Smart Monitoring and Disease Detection for Robotic Harvesting of Tomatoes

Tomato is a one of the most popular produced and extensively consumed vegetables in the world. Typical agricultural systems make extensive use of human labor which is more costly and less effective. This research explores the minimization of human labor through automation. The diseases infected by tomato plants are hard to detect. Identifying these diseases in advance would save the cultivation of the disease from spreading, thereby saving the crop. It is also a difficult task to recognize the ripe harvest and experienced labor is required. The efficiency of the harvesting method will be increased by automating the identification process of ripened fruits. Manually picking tomatoes can cause some harm to the fruits during plucking due to inconsistencies in human labor. Such damage will be reduced through a better implemented robotic scheme. This paper presents the development of autonomous system for tomato harvesting and disease detection.