Design of an efficient combined multipoint picking scheme for tea buds

Lijia Xu; Yi Xie; Xinyuan Chen; Yanjun Chen; Zhiliang Kang; Peng Huang; Zhiyong Zou; Yong He; Ning Yang; Yingqi Peng; Jianwu Dai; Zhijun Wu; Bi Liu; Yuchao Wang; Yongpeng Zhao

doi:10.3389/fpls.2022.1042035

Design of an efficient combined multipoint picking scheme for tea buds

Front Plant Sci. 2022 Nov 22:13:1042035. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2022.1042035. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Lijia Xu¹, Yi Xie¹, Xinyuan Chen², Yanjun Chen¹, Zhiliang Kang¹, Peng Huang¹, Zhiyong Zou¹, Yong He³, Ning Yang⁴, Yingqi Peng¹, Jianwu Dai¹, Zhijun Wu¹, Bi Liu¹, Yuchao Wang¹, Yongpeng Zhao¹

Affiliations

¹ College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Sichuan Agriculture University, Ya'an, China.
² College of Engineering, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China.
³ School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang, China.
⁴ College of Biosystems Engineering and Food Science, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.

Abstract

Herein, a combined multipoint picking scheme was proposed, and the sizes of the end of the bud picker were selectively designed. Firstly, the end of the bud picker was abstracted as a fixed-size picking box, and it was assumed that the tea buds in the picking box have a certain probability of being picked. Then, the picking box coverage and the greedy algorithm were designed to make as few numbers of picking box set as possible to cover all buds to reduce the numbers of picking. Furthermore, the Graham algorithm and the minimum bounding box were applied to fine-tune the footholds of each picking box in the optimal coverage picking box set, so that the buds were concentrated in the middle of the picking boxes as much as possible. Moreover, the geometric center of each picking box was taken as a picking point, and the ant colony algorithm was used to optimize the picking path of the end of the bud picker. Finally, by analyzing the influence of several parameters on the picking performance of the end of the bud picker, the optimal sizes of the picking box were calculated successfully under different conditions. The experimental results showed that the average picking numbers of the combined multipoint picking scheme were reduced by 31.44%, the shortest picking path was decreased by 11.10%, and the average consumed time was reduced by 50.92% compared to the single-point picking scheme. We believe that the proposed scheme can provide key technical support for the subsequent design of intelligent bud-picking robots.

Keywords: Graham algorithm; greedy algorithm; minimum bounding box; picking box sets; tea buds.