FruitTouch: A Perceptive Gripper for Gentle and Scalable Fruit Harvesting
Ruohan Zhang, Mohammad Amin Mirzaee, Wenzhen Yuan

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.
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Taxonomy
TopicsTree Root and Stability Studies · Smart Agriculture and AI · Soft Robotics and Applications
