Robotic Mushroom Harvesting by Employing Probabilistic Road Map and Inverse Kinematics

A collision free path to a target location in a random farm is computed by employing a probabilistic roadmap (PRM) that can handle static and dynamic obstacles. The location of ripened mushrooms is an input obtained by image processing. A mushroom harvesting robot is discussed that employs inverse kinematics (IK) at the target location to compute the state of a robotic hand for holding a ripened mushroom and plucking it. Kinematic model of a two-finger dexterous hand with 3 degrees of freedom for plucking mushrooms was developed using the Denavit-Hartenberg method. Unlike previous research in mushroom harvesting, mushrooms are not planted in a grid or some pattern, but are randomly distributed. No human intervention is required at any stage of harvesting.