Development of a real-time machine vision system for the apple harvesting robot

This research describes the development of a real-time machine vision system to guide a harvesting robotic manipulator for the red Fuji apples. The machine vision system is composed of a color CCD video camera to acquire Fuji apple images at the orchard and a PC to process the acquired images. The machine vision system was able to recognize the fruit under the different lighting conditions and it could locate the fruit in less than one second.