Collision free path planning of a robotic manipulator for pruning apple trees

Azlan Zahid, Long He, Daeun Dana Choi, James Schupp, Paul Heinemann

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

10 Scopus citations

Abstract

Pruning of apple trees requires 80-120 working hours of labor per hectare accounting for 20% of the total production cost. Robotic pruning is a potential solution to decrease labor dependence and associated costs. Autonomous precise manipulation of a robotic manipulator in presence of obstacles is a challenge. The spatial requirements and collision-free path planning for the robotic manipulator is essential for automated systems. This simulation study focused on investigating the branch accessibility of a six-rotational (6R) degrees of freedom (DoF) robotic manipulator with a shear blade type end-effector. A virtual tree canopy environment was established in MATLAB for simulation. The Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT) obstacle avoidance algorithm was used to establish a collision-free path to reach the target pruning points. The path smoothing and optimization algorithms were also used to reduce path length and calculate the optimize path. The simulation showed that the integrated robotic manipulator reached the pruning points avoiding obstacle untargeted branches. The path generation time, path length, target reaching time, and number of accessible branches (success) and collisions (failure) was recorded. The study provides the foundation information for future work on the development of a robotic pruning system.

Original languageEnglish (US)
DOIs
StatePublished - 2020
Event2020 ASABE Annual International Meeting - Virtual, Online
Duration: Jul 13 2020Jul 15 2020

Conference

Conference2020 ASABE Annual International Meeting
CityVirtual, Online
Period7/13/207/15/20

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Agronomy and Crop Science
  • Bioengineering

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