TRIZ-AIDED DESIGN AND EXPERIMENT OF KIWIFRUIT PICKING END-EFFECTOR

Currently kiwifruit picking process mainly leverages manual labour, which has low productivity and high human effort, meanwhile the existing kiwifruit picking machinery also has low picking efficiency and easily damages fruits. In this regard, a multi-fruit envelope-cutting kiwifruit picking end-effector was designed by applying TRIZ assistance in this paper. First, a common kiwifruit picking end-effector was selected as a prototype, the functional analysis method of TRIZ was applied to discover the functional defects of the prototype, after which TRIZ solution tools such as technical contradiction analysis, substance-field analysis, and trimming were applied to improve and innovate, a kiwifruit picking end-effector for automatically recognizing fruits-enveloping fruit clusters-cutting and separating fruit stalks was designed to pick kiwifruit in clusters. Then, ADAMS was applied to perform gait simulation of the end-effector picking action to verify the smoothness and coherence of the picking process. Finally, a kiwifruit picking test stand was set up to conduct picking tests in the form of fruit clusters. The results showed that the average time to pick each cluster of fruit was 8.8s, the picking success rate was 89.3%, and the picking damage rate was 6.0%. All the indicators were better than the prototype and met the expected design requirements.