System Design and Kinematics Analysis of 3-DOF Agricultural Picking Arm

Picking vegetables and fruits is a huge workload. Replacing manpower with robots has a great prospect to reduce the burden. However, due to the complex terrain and different planting conditions, the agricultural picking robots are still in low popularity. In this paper, a 3-DOF banana picking manipulator is designed and developed for the banana harvesting robot, which is easy to use, and can carry out large travel expansion and wide harvesting area. Firstly, the kinematics model of the mechanical arm is established by improved D-H method. The relationship between each link and coordinate system is established, and the joint variables are obtained. Then the forward and inverse kinematics equations are calculated. Secondly, the robotic toolbox in MATLAB is used to verify the correctness of kinematic model. Finally, the trajectory simulation in joint space is carried out and the relevant curves of displacement, speed and acceleration are obtained. It shows that the process of banana harvesting by 3-DOF banana picking manipulator designed in this paper is smooth to achieve the harvesting purpose.