AUTOMATED IN-FIELD ASSESSMENT OF STRAWBERRY CHARACTERISTICS FOR MECHANIZED HARVESTING

The major goal of this SBIRproject is to research,design and prototype a field operable strawberry assessment capability that canestimate strawberry ripeness, damage, shape and size from several camera views of the berries. This goal is in support ofL5 Automation's largeraimto develop an autonomous strawberry harvesting solution that is a drop-in substitue for human hand harvestlaborers. Such a solution must perform the same tasks that humans do today which includes picking the berries, inspecting and sorting the picked berries according to their quality, and finally packing the retail grade berries into clamshells and depositing other grades of berries into an appropriate bin. The technology and knowledge gained in the develompent of the proposedassessment system will aid all three operations required of the harvester: Pick, Inspect and Pack.To reach this goal L5 has identifiedtechnical objectives for Phase I of the SBIR:1. Create a labeled dataset of harvested strawberries which will support the implementation ofalgorithms to assess required strawberry characteristics. This will include recording images ofall conditions of berries found in the fieldand precisely measuring and labeling their characteristics. The exact size of the dataset may vary, but a sufficient dataset will enable machine learning algorithms to be trained to an accuracy that meets or exceeds that of a human inspector.2. Design and build a prototype portable automated strawberry characteristics assessment system that can categorize strawberries according to grower business requirements and USDA inspection guidelines. This prototype must:be sufficiently portable to be operated in the fieldcapture enough views of the strawberries to enable the trained algorithms to estimate the strawberry's characteristics as or more accurately than a human inspector.With success in Phase I, L5 will be well positioned to extend the work in future Phases to aid in making a pick / no pick decision as well as categorizing the berries for retail sale, juice or discard and finallyprecisely packing the clamshells to the correct weight. Furthermore, the system can be optimized for performance andbe integrated into the larger autonomous harvesting solution.