Flexible sensing enabled intelligent manipulator system (FSIMS) for avocados (Persea Americana Mill)

ABSTRACT

In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and the global sales trend of fruits, automatic ripeness grading of fruits is of great significance for enterprises, reducing labor-related costs and precise resource regulation of the fruit industry chain. The wrong ripeness grading may lead to inferior products entering the market chain and resulting in over ripeness, spoilage, quality degradation, and economic loss issues. Traditional manual grading and machine vision-enabled grading methods are facing a series of challenges, such as low efficiency, inconsistent grading standards, and vulnerability to environmental interferences. Therefore, a flexible sensing enabled intelligent manipulator system (FSIMS) is developed for efficient, automatic and accurate ripeness grading of avocados, one of the most popular and economically valuable fruits in the world. When avocados of different ripeness level are gripping, the flexible sensing units attached in the clamps can sense the firmness of the contact points and feedback different pressure values of the system, which could accurately determine four ripeness levels of avocados. Compared with traditional manual or machine vision enabled fruit ripeness grading methods, the designed FSIMS could achieve better grading effect (97.5% accuracy), and the system also has a faster grading speed (the fast-grading speed could reach 1.3 s/time) and high environmental robustness. The application of FSIMS could effectively reduce the waste of avocados in the market supply chain, greatly alleviating the labor-intensive and inefficiency problems of the fruits ripeness grading, thereby promoting the more sustainable and cleaner production of the avocado industry.