A Fuzzy Controller Design for a Stem-Vibration Strawberry Harvester Robot

Recent studies have shown the acceptable performance of robotic solutions as reliable techniques in agricultural fields. Robotic fruit shakers contain planar mechanisms with a high degree of freedom. This research involved the performance evaluation of several conventional controllers, as well as a fuzzy controller, in controlling the vibration of a strawberry fruit-stem system using a five-degree-of-freedom air-suspension stem-vibration (ASSV) mechanism. The displacement and angular velocity of strawberry fruit, as the last arm of the mechanism, is studied during the experiments. Simulation results revealed that compared to optimal, high-passed filter, and low-passed filter controllers, an intelligent controller based on the fuzzy inference system resulted in more appropriate performance with appropriate settling time and maximum overshoot of the study state variables.