Designing a robotic gripper for harvesting horticulture products

This paper approaches the design problem of suitable grippers for a robotic arm to pick up horticulture products. General considerations have been poi nted out and main concepts and mechanical designs have been discussed and p roposed by sketches and drawings for an easy understanding of "on-field" pr oblems and feasible solutions. Pneumatic actuation has been proposed with s uitable grasp force control by using commercial components. Specific attent ion has been focused on tomato horticulture for a practical design and prot otyping of a device for laboratory experiments.