Design and Experiment of Intelligent Monorail Cucumbers Harvester System

Abstract. The cucumber with widespread planted area has a large market share. In order to achieve the requirement of high harvesting efficient under the existing planting patterns, the intelligent monorail cucumbers harvester system has been designed. The intelligent harvester which runs on the monorail is mainly composed with harvest box, monorail assembly bracket system, and control system. Its harvest box is placed on the hooks of the harvester. The way of image capturing with combination of infrared sensor and intelligent camera is feasible. The mature cucumbers can be distinguished by using gray transformation algorithm, trimming image edge algorithm, and locally maximal variance between-class threshold algorithm. The end-effector can be controlled to cut or avoid the cucumbers which hang on the hooks under the monorail during the falling vines. The results show that the average harvesting success rate is 97.28% when the running speed is 0.6m/s. It meets harvesting requirements, and has good prospects.