An Overview of Grippers in Agriculture Robotic Systems

An area of interest for researchers in the recent decades is to reduce production costs by using independent robotic systems in agriculture, especially in farms and crops. The conducted research encompassed in the open literature and the technological developments have been undertaken in the three major areas of smart farming: Management Information System, Precision Agriculture and Agricultural Automation and Robotics. This paper is focused on presenting a comprehensive overview of the different types of agricultural grippers, which are an integrating part of the robotics systems used in smart farming technologies. First, the need for harvesting and phenotyping grippers is briefly presented, followed by a table-summary of their techno-functional properties. Then, the main attention is paid to a detailed analysis which includes several classifications of the grippers presented in the open literature based on their main characteristics, such as: overall dimensions, type of fingers, number of fingers, actuation solution and so on.