FruitTouch: A Perceptive Gripper for Gentle and Scalable Fruit Harvesting

TL;DR

FruitTouch is a compact, sensorized gripper with vision-based tactile sensing designed for gentle, scalable fruit harvesting, providing real-time feedback to improve grasp stability and prevent damage.

Contribution

It introduces a novel optical tactile sensing system integrated into a compact gripper for versatile, gentle fruit harvesting with real-time condition assessment.

Findings

Robust grasp stability demonstrated in real-world tests

Effective damage prevention during harvesting

Rich tactile information enables force and slip estimation

Abstract

The automation of fruit harvesting has gained increasing significance in response to rising labor shortages. A sensorized gripper is a key component of this process, which must be compact enough for confined spaces, able to stably grasp diverse fruits, and provide reliable feedback on fruit conditions for efficient harvesting. To address this need, we propose FruitTouch, a compact gripper that integrates high-resolution, vision-based tactile sensing through an optimized optical design. This configuration accommodates a wide range of fruit sizes while maintaining low cost and mechanical simplicity. Tactile images captured by an embedded camera provide rich information for real-time force estimation, slip detection, and softness prediction. We validate the gripper in real-world fruit harvesting experiments, demonstrating robust grasp stability and effective damage prevention.