FRUIT HARVESTING DRONE

Abstract

Fruit plucking during harvesting period involves labor intensive and time consuming steps. 
Automatic fruit plucking drones has to be developed to avoid the scarcity of labor and to 
consume less time. In order to make drones automatic, fruits have to be detected and 
classified properly. Drone need to be stabilized during flight and remotely controlled by the 
user. Robotic arm with gripper needs to be interfaced with the drone to pluck and hold the 
fruit. Fruit detection is performed by training different fruit images to object detection 
algorithms like SSD-Lite. Recognized fruit information is given to user through Raspberry Pi 
and is displayed in receiver module. Then Raspberry Pi controls the robotic arm 
automatically to pluck the fruits. Project can be implemented to harvest various kinds of 
fruits in orchards like apple, banana, guava and citrus etc.