Innovative Robot For Chamomile Flower Harvesting As A New Approach Based On Visual Selection

Abstract

One of the most significant crops, the production of which the Egyptian government tends to increase, is chamomile flowers. In contrast, the expansion of this crop's agriculture is being driven by the high cost of manual harvesting. The goal of this study was to design and test a robot that could harvest chamomile flowers while preserving the plant's health, cutting costs, and maintaining flower quality. A prototype of chamomile flower harvesting robot was designed, manufactured and tested. The robot consists of three main systems: the mobile platform, the delta mechanism, and the visual selection system which detects the flowers ready for harvesting. The flower quality and technical evaluation criteria were the two primary evaluation factors. An overall evaluation criterion for manual harvesting and harvesting robots was also calculated in order to compare the two harvesting systems. The chamomile robot could achieve a cycle time of 3s and harvest time 21s/plant. During the harvest season, the robot produced 1200 flowers/hour with an average harvest success 75% - 89%. Three aspects of the robot's visual system were examined: detection ability, accuracy, and detection precision ratio. The outcomes demonstrated that the robot could achieve an accuracy of 72.4% and a detection precision ratio of 75%. For the flower quality criterion, the majority of the flower samples gathered by the robot fell into the high-quality and medium-quality flower categories. According to the overall endpoint results, the robot outperformed manual harvesting (23.53%) in terms of percentage (80%).