Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 204 (2023) 107552

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Computers and Electronics in Agriculture

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/compag

Original papers

Development and evaluation of a robust soft robotic gripper for apple

harvesting
Xing Wang a,b ,1 , Hanwen Kang a ,1 , Hongyu Zhou a , Wesley Au a , Michael Yu Wang a , Chao Chen a ,∗
a
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Monash University, Clayton, Australia
b
Robotics and Autonomous Systems Group, Data61, CSIRO, Brisbane, Australia

ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT

Keywords: Fruit harvesting is facing challenges due to the labour shortage, which has been more severe since the
Soft robotics rapid pandemic. Robotic harvesting has been attempted in autonomous fruit harvesting tasks, such as apple
Soft gripper harvesting. However, current apple harvesting robots show limited harvesting performance in the orchard
Fruit harvesting
environment due to the inefficiency of the robotic grippers. This research presents a fruit harvesting method
High force
that includes a novel soft robotic gripper and a detachment strategy to achieve apple harvesting in the natural
Apple grasping
orchard. The soft robotic gripper includes four tapered soft robotic fingers (SRF) and one multi-mode suction
cup. The SRF is customised to avoid interference with obstacles during grasping, and its compliance and
force exertion are comprehensively evaluated with FEA and experiments. The multi-mode suction cup can
provide suction adhesion force, show active extrusion/withdrawal, and present passive compliance mode.
The simultaneously twist-pulling motion is finally proposed and implemented to detach the apples from the
trees. The proposed robotic gripper is compact, compliant with apple grasping and generates a large grasping
force. Our proposed method is finally validated in a natural orchard and achieves a detachment, damage and
harvesting rate of 75.6%, 4.55%, and 70.77%, respectively.

1. Introduction robot, whose end-effector consists of a clasp mechanism made of food-

Fruit harvesting is facing increasing challenges due to its labour-
intensive nature and the workforce’s diminishing work passion in agri-
culture (Zhou et al., 2022; Zheng et al., 2021; Ma et al., 2014). It has
become even more severe since the rapid pandemic caused by COVID-
19 (Tougeron and Hance, 2021; Larue, 2020). Robotic harvesting can
address the labour shortage issue and prevent fruit waste from being
unharvested or rotting (Junge and Hughes, 2022).
As a research hot spot, some pioneering research has recently been
conducted on autonomous and intelligent fruit harvesting robots (Tang
et al., 2020; Bogue, 2020; Hua et al., 2019; Ji et al., 2022a). Some
robots mainly aim for selective harvesting, which uses end-effectors
associated with the robotic arm to detach the fruits selectively (Kurtser
and Edan, 2020; Liu et al., 2020; Gao et al., 2022; Zhang et al., 2020b;
Kang et al., 2020). Simon et al. designed a lettuce harvesting robot with
a pneumatic actuated knife to cut the lettuce off for deposit (Birrell
et al., 2020). Although a high harvest success rate of 88.2% was
achieved, the damage rate was poor at 38% due to the rigid mechanical
cutting mechanism, which prevents its broader application in precision
harvesting. Henry et al. developed an autonomous kiwi fruit harvesting
grade silicone cast on the 3D printed rigid pad (Williams et al., 2019).
The comprehensive in-field trial suggested that a successful harvesting
rate of 51% and an average cycle tie of 5.5 s per fruit are achieved. The
low success rate mainly dues to the accident drop-off and knock-off by
the gripper during the harvesting process, as the kiwi fruit are highly
clustered.
Autonomous apple harvesting also attracts increasing attention in
industry and research fields (Hu et al., 2022; Ji et al., 2022b, 2021;
Wang et al., 2022; Kang et al., 2022a). Industry trials prefer non-
fingered end-effectors, such as the suction tube mechanism. Abundant
robotics and Ripe robotics utilised a large fluid pipe, where the vacuum
can be generated to suck the apples into the pipe (Zhang et al., 2020a).
There is no official data available to evaluate the overall harvesting
performance. However, the suction pipe may suffer from frequent jams
due to the leaves and multiple occluded fruits. Robotic grippers as
an effective solution for selective harvesting were also investigated to
grasp and detach the fruits from the trees. Soft robotic fingers, the
essential component of the robotic gripper, are typically made from soft
hyperelastic materials with a Young modulus of less than 1 GPa (Rus

∗ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: Chao.Chen@monash.edu (C. Chen).
1
These authors contributed equally.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compag.2022.107552
Received 1 August 2022; Received in revised form 10 November 2022; Accepted 6 December 2022
Available online 14 December 2022
0168-1699/© 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
X. Wang et al.
and Tolley, 2015). They can generate compliant, flexible, and highly
adaptive bending motion from the pre-defined geometry (Peng et al.,
2018; Elfferich et al., 2022). Some research has been conducted to
apply soft robotics to agriculture applications due to these advantages
over the traditional rigid grippers (Navas et al., 2021; Hohimer et al.,
2019; Zhao et al., 2011). Davidson et al. proposed an apple harvesting
robot, which utilised a cable-driven three-finger robotic gripper to
detach the apples from the trees. An overall success rate of 84% with
a cycle time of 6 s per apple was reported (Davidson et al., 2016).
Even though the soft pads are applied at the tip of the robotic finger,
the compliance of the robotic gripper is greatly limited by the rigid
linkages. In addition, the trial orchard was pre-processed by thinning
and reducing the complexity of the environment. The robotic grasp-
ing, detachment, and overall harvesting performance were expected
to drop in the more complex and clustered environment. Hohimer
et al. utilised a 3D printed soft end-effector to harvest the ‘‘Envy’’
apple (Hohimer et al., 2019). The soft end-effector provides some
improvements over previous grasping end-effectors. The compliant soft
fingers were unharmed by collisions with the tree canopy and trellis
wires and improved significantly from their last generation of tendon-
driven fingers. Their gripper can provide 49.54 N pulling force under
103.4 kPa input pressure. However, the gripper design is bulky in
size to maximise the grasping force. It relies on a symmetrical grasp
with simultaneous activation of fingers (no suction) to grasp and direct
pulling to detach, which causes significant damage to adjacent fruit
while detaching in an orchard environment.
Despite the attempts and advances in industry and research to
develop autonomous apple harvesting robots, the current robotic grip-
per is still not robust or reliable enough to deal with the complex
orchard environment, and their overall system performances are still
unsatisfactory from being fully deployed in the natural orchard. This
is because the current under-developed gripper designs, such as the
bulky, rigid gripper, unreliable soft end-effectors etc., cannot meet
the requirements of being compliant, compact in size, forceful, and
dexterous simultaneously. These disadvantages make it hard to harvest
the apples in the natural orchard.
This study proposes a novel dexterous soft robotic gripper with
tapered soft robotic fingers and an adaptive suction cup. The tapered
robotic finger shows excellent conformability and large force exertion,
while the suction cup assists the grasping with active suction and
passive compliance. This works also enables the suction cup with multi
modes: active extrusion/retraction and passive adaption. This work
then introduces a detachment strategy to simultaneously combine the
twist and pulling motion after grasping the target. Unlike the direct
twist or pulling that cause knocking down adjacent apples or shaking
of mature apples respectively, the proposed detachment strategy is an
efficient way to reduce fruit waste during harvesting. Lastly, this work
integrates the proposed soft robotic gripper with the system to conduct
in-field experiments to validate their harvesting performance.
The rest of the paper is organised as follows. The materials and
methodologies of our approach are presented in Section 2. The experi-
ment results and discussion are presented in Section 3, followed by the
conclusion in Section 4.
2. Materials and methodology
2.1. Orchard environment and design consideration
Different fruit tree arrangements, including traditional 3D complex
trees and 2D planar tree structures, are managed to keep different apple
varieties. The harvesting mainly focuses on the 2D planar structures,
with the apple variety being ‘‘pink lady’’. These are wire trellis in the
orchard. The apples are grown and arranged in a planar manner, which
is ideal for autonomous robotic harvesting. The apples are reasonably
dense and occluded for our test spots, as shown in Fig. 1(a). The
autonomous apple harvesting tests are conducted in Fankhauser Apple
2
Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 204 (2023) 107552
Orchard, located in Drouin, Australia, and the system is shown in
Fig. 1(b).
It can be seen that there is occlusion on the apples caused by
leaves, branches, or clustered apples, which should be considered in
the robotic gripper design to maximise the performance of the robotic
grasping. Leaves can potentially cause slipperiness between the finger
and the contact surface of the apple, so it is crucial to secure the
grasping pattern and lock the apple in place once it is grasped. This
can be tackled by designing grippers with multi-fingers. The contact
surface is maximised, preventing the potential slippery caused by leaf
interference while grasping. In addition, the branches can be thick and
stiff, which needs to be avoided during grasping. This requires the
gripper to limit the contact area with the environment but keep the
large contact surface with fruits. Occluded apples also pose challenges
to conformal grasping. Solutions reducing the interference from adja-
cent apples should also be explored to minimise the potential failure
grasping rate and risk of knocking down these apples. The design will
investigate the tapered soft robotic finger with a gradually decreasing
cross-section area to minimise the potential contact at the gripper tip.
The diameters of the apple mainly fall into a range of 67–82 mm,
with an average of 75.6 mm. The average apple weight comes to 162 g.
These data are calculated from the harvested apples. The number of
clustered apples is also identified as an estimation of the grasping diffi-
culty index, as the clustered apple is more difficult to achieve conformal
grasping than the isolated and hanging ones. All the information needs
to be considered in the design of soft pneumatic grippers to achieve a
higher detachment rate.
2.2. Gripper development and modelling
2.2.1. Design consideration
From the orchard environment and fruit data, we propose a four-
finger soft pneumatic gripper with an additional suction component, as
shown in Fig. 2. The four-finger design is a compromised solution for
performance and operation difficulty. It can guarantee the contact area
with the target fruit to prevent the potential slippery while retracting
and does not over-complicate the grasping subsystem of the robot.
To reduce the interference with branches and adjacent apples during
grasping, SRF is designed to have a tapered shape to reduce the body
size while keeping the forceful output. The feasibility of the tapered
shape and structure parameters are evaluated through finite element
modelling. The detailed study is presented in the next section.
Additionally, a suction cup with an active extension/retraction func-
tion and novel passive compliance is proposed and integrated with the
soft gripper. The active motion is achieved by the extrusion/withdrawal
of the pneumatic cylinder, as shown in Fig. 2(c). The stoke of the
suction cup is 0.091 m, and the dimension of the suction cup is also
shown in Fig. 2(d). It has a length of 0.036 m. It can suck objects under
negative pressure. The passive mode is realised by setting both ends of
the pneumatic cylinder to atmosphere pressure. In this case, the suction
cup is free to move together with the shaft of the pneumatic cylinder.
The rest of the parts are designed and manufactured from 3D printing
with a consumer-level printer, Prusa MK3S.
2.2.2. Soft robotic finger
The SRF is designed with a hollow fold-based structure, extending
along its longitudinal direction once under pressurisation. The addi-
tional strain limiting layer is added to constrain the extension at the
bottom side (see Fig. 3). In this case, the elongation at the top will
be larger than the bottom side upon inflation, generating the bending
motion for each SRF. It is then 3D-printed with hyperelastic material
named Ninjaflex. This tapered SRF is an updated version of the bistable
soft pneumatic fingers from our previous research work (Wang et al.,
2020, 2021). The past work utilised a finger design with constant height
to generate a constant curvature bending profile. The energy storage
mechanism from our previous design enables the soft finger with
X. Wang et al. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 204 (2023) 107552

Fig. 1. (a) 2D apple orchard, and (b) Monash Apple harvesting system.

Fig. 2. (a) Simplified model for the overall system, (b) Detailed view of the proposed soft robotic gripper, (c) the stroke of suction cup (two SRFs are visualised in this plot), (d)
dimensions of the suction cup.

Fig. 3. (a) 3D view of the tapered soft robotic finger, (b) The detailed cross-section view of the SRF.

3
X. Wang et al.
Fig. 4. (a) Dog-bone test sample, (b) Instron Universal Tester, (c) The average stress–strain curve and curve fitting with Mooney–Rivlin model.
the binary bending states. Those grippers pose two bending profiles:
open and closing, corresponding to two local minimum energy states
during the operation. They can rapidly close within less than 0.2s by
releasing the pre-stored strain energy. The disadvantage is that this
high-speed closing only stops when blocked by external objects. This
process cannot be controlled with the current control method, making
apple grasping difficult. This can cause fruit damage like bruises, which
needs to be avoided for future sales in the market. In addition, their
constant height, especially the large tip size, generates a constant
bending curvature increasing the chance of interference with adjacent
obstacles. A tapered shape, in this case, can better extend to the deep
canopy for fruit grasping. This design with a tapered shape on similar
soft robotic fingers also suggests that the tapered design can benefit
grasping tasks (Dilibal et al., 2018). The structure optimisation of
the soft gripper can also be implemented because soft grippers from
human design, bio-inspired design, or even some local computation
design algorithms are likely not to be globally optimised in terms of
performance (Xavier et al., 2021; Pinskier and Howard, 2022; Chen
and Wang, 2020). In this case, further structure/parameter optimisation
research can be conducted to find an optimal gripper design for apple
harvesting. However, it is not within the scope of this research stage.
The interactions between a robot gripper and the deformable fruit
are highly complex and thus challenging to model. So this work ex-
plored the bending profiles, force output, and physical contact with
fruit by finite element modelling simulation and tested from experi-
ments. The material property of Ninjaflex is found from a tensile test,
while that of apple fruit is from Fan et al. (2021).
2.2.3. Tensile test and material characteristic
The material property of Ninjaflex is evaluated from the tensile
test following ISO 37 standards. The dog-bone samples in Fig. 4(a)
are printed longitudinally and stretched by Instron Universal Tester
E3000 with a speed of 200 mm/min. The average stress–strain data
fit into Mooney–Rivlin modes in Abaqus, as shown in Fig. 4(c). The
Mooney–Rivlin model is below with the material constants shown in
Table 1 (Kim et al., 2012; Kumar and Rao, 2016).
𝐸𝑠𝑡𝑟 = 𝐶10 (𝐼1 −3)+𝐶01 (𝐼2 −3)+𝐶11 (𝐼1 −3)(𝐼2 −3)+𝐶20 (𝐼1 −3)2 +𝐶02 (𝐼2 −3)2
(1)
𝐸𝑠𝑡𝑟 is the overall stored strain energy per unit volume.
The results from the tensile test are utilised in the finite element
modelling section below. Note the polynomial is selected in Abaqus
settings.
4
Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 204 (2023) 107552
Table 1
Mooney Rivlin model for NinjaFlex.
Hyperelastic model Material constant Value
C01 2.90 MPa
C10 −0.045 MPa
Mooney Rivlin C11 −0.017 MPa
C20 0.0023 MPa
C02 0.18 MPa
incompressible Parameter D 0 MPa−1
2.2.4. Finite element modelling
FEA is utilised as a pilot study to study the bending behaviour,
force exertion, and contact with apples. The simulation is conducted in
Abaqus/CAE with the material properties found in the previous section.
The SRF, block, and apple are imported into the Abaqus in step format.
The block is to simulate the load cell. Then the material properties
are assigned for each object. The SRF, block and apple are meshed
with Tetrahedral quadratic hybrid elements (element type C3D10H)
for faster convergence. The SRF instance is first created, whose inner
cavity is subjected to various static input pressures and the proximal
end is enabled with the ENCASTRE boundary condition. The instance,
including SRF and block, is then created to find the blocked tip force
of the SRF. The last instance includes SRF, and the apple is created to
find the finger’s conformability when grasping the apple.
2.3. Detachment strategy and control circuit
Once the target fruit is grasped or secured within the proposed
gripper, the following detachment motion becomes the dominant role
in removing the fruit from the tree. Selecting the proper strategy is
one of the critical factors in improving the operation efficiency, and
harvesting rate (Fan et al., 2021). We investigate the most efficient de-
tachment strategies from the literature, including direct twist, pulling,
lifting, and bending (Navas et al., 2021). Another recent research on
human three-finger grasp experiments concludes that the best pattern
was determined to be rotation–pull. This result is from evaluating the
separation force during a dynamic simulation (Fan et al., 2021). Our
previous in-field harvesting experiments also suggest that combining
twist and pulling motion is efficient (Wang et al., 2022). This study
involves adjusting and synchronising the twist and pulling motion for
detachment efficiency.
X. Wang et al.
Fig. 5. The overall control circuit for the system.
2.3.1. Pneumatic control circuit and suction component
This section details the overall control circuit of the Monash Apple
Retrieving System (MARS), as shown in Fig. 5. MARS consists of 4 com-
ponents: mobile base, LiDAR-RGB vision, UR5 manipulator, and soft
robotic gripper. A central laptop is the master of communication, con-
nected to LiDAR-RGB (Livox-Realsense), a Robotic manipulator (Uni-
versal Robot 5), and an Arduino controller via Ethernet and USB
Ethernet and USB cables, respectively. Only LiDAR is directly connected
to a 24 V power supply, while the others are connected to an inverter
that generates 220 V AC from the 24 V battery. The communication
between each component is conducted through ROS Melodic, while the
laptop serves as the ROS master and others as the ROS nodes. Fig. 6
shows the pneumatic control circuit. The Arduino controller controls
the pneumatic components. It sends signals to relays and activates
certain solenoid valves. There are six solenoid valves, including one
five-port-three-way solenoid valve and five five-port-two-way solenoid
valves.
The pneumatic control cycle is to control certain solenoid valves
and the downstream pneumatic components with compressed air. Once
the soft robotic finger opens, the five-port-two-way solenoid valve that
controls the suction cup is firstly activated to provide suction force for
adhesion, as shown in Fig. 7(a). The five-port-three-way valve is then
activated to drive the pneumatic cylinder to extrude the suction cup.
Thirdly, the pneumatic cylinder sucks the apple and instantly switches
to passive and compliant mode, as shown in Fig. 7(b). Next, the suction
cup withdraws, and four solenoid valves that control the soft pneumatic
finger will be activated to close the finger, as shown in Fig. 7(c) and
(d). The object is secured inside the gripper. Further twist and pulling
motion is enabled by the UR5 manipulator, as shown in Fig. 7(e). Once
the apple is picked from the tree, the end-effector and the picked apple
are manipulated by the robotic arm to reach the predefined deposit
position. This deposit position sits right at one end of the sliding tubes.
2.4. Overall system setup and test
2.4.1. Hardware setup and workflow
The soft robotic gripper is integrated with the MARS to perform au-
tonomous apple harvesting in the Fankhauser apple orchard in Drouin,
Australia. Aside from the four main components, a trailer that drives
the pump to provide the pressure source and an apple deposit subsys-
tem with a plastic basket are also included. The integrated system is
as shown in Fig. 1(b). The overall flow of the harvesting robot can
be summarised as follows. Once the harvesting starts, the mobile base
navigates to a position at a certain distance from the fruit plane. This
distance guarantees that the target apples are within the workspace
of the UR5 manipulator. Next, the robotic arm and soft gripper are
5
Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 204 (2023) 107552
set to the predefined home positions for the following motions. Visual
perception performs fruit detection using the RGB image received from
the Realsense camera. Then LiDAR-RGB fusion algorithm matches the
corresponding targets from RGB to LiDAR frames and records their 3D
locations. A picking sequence is defined based on the depth distance
of each detected apple. After that, the final path is generated from
the IK solver and path selection. UR5 manipulator moves to a closer
position to the first apple. Next, grasping is enabled starting from the
suction force generation of the suction cup. It is then pushed out to
contact the target apple by a pneumatic cylinder. Once it sucks the
apple, the suction cup retracts together with the apple. The fingers close
immediately to secure the apple within the closure. It must be noted
that the suction cup only provides initial contact and suction to allow
the soft robotic finger to conform to the apple promptly and thoroughly.
Purely relying on a suction cup is not efficient due to the complex
orchard environment. Then wrist three of the UR5 arm twists 270
degrees, and the arm pulls out of the canopy for 20 cm simultaneously
to detach the fruit from the tree. The manipulator moves the apple
to the deposit position and opens the gripper to collect the apple.
The grasping-to-deposit processes finish once the last planned apple is
harvested (see Fig. 8).
2.4.2. Performance evaluation
The performance of the soft robotic gripper is evaluated through the
individual finger test, the grasping force test of the four-finger gripper,
as well as the performance evaluation of the integrated system. The
individual finger tests involve the test of bending profile and tip force.
The former indicates different bending states under various inflation
pressures, while the latter means different force exertion under various
input pressures. The grasping force test evaluates the force required to
pull the object out of the closed gripper. This estimates the maximum
effective grasping force the gripper can provide during the detachment
process.
The performance evaluation of the integrated harvesting system
includes the following indexes:
• Detection rate: the number of detected apples with 3D location
per total number of apples within the RGB image. The apple
picking is conducted for mature apples as directed by the farm
owner, so we do not apply maturity classification in this section.
• Path planning success rate: the number of successfully planned
paths to each detection apple per total required paths.
• Detachment rate: the number of successfully detached apples per
total apples planned to detach.
• Damage rate: the number of damaged apples per total detached
apples.
X. Wang et al. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 204 (2023) 107552

Fig. 6. The overall pneumatic control circuit for the gripper.

Fig. 7. (a) Gripper open and suction force enabled to approach target apple, (b) Suction cup extrudes and adheres target, (c) Suction cup withdraws, (d) Finger closes instantly,
(e) Robotic arm twists and pulls the apple simultaneously to detach the target. Note one finger is hidden from (b) for better visualisation.

3. Results and discussion
3.1. Bending curvature of SRF
The bending curvature is utilised to evaluate the bending state of the
robotic fingers under specific input pressures. This can help understand
the bending state when the SRF is inflated in the free space.
The finite element analysis is initially performed to evaluate the
design feasibility of the proposed robotic finger design, which involves
the study of design parameters and tapered chamber structure. After
this pilot study, the physical robotic finger is printed and evaluated. The
finger is fixed at the base and inflated from 0 kPa to 80 kPa, as shown in
Fig. 9. During the inflation, a step of 20 kPa increment is implemented,
while the deformation of the fingers is recorded and saved for further
processing. The performance under 10 kPa instead of 20 kPa is recorded

6
X. Wang et al.
Fig. 8. The workflow for the apple harvesting, including system initialisation, visual perception, path planning, grasping, detachment, and final deposit.
Fig. 9. (a) Bending motion under 10 kPa, (b) Bending motion under 40 kPa, (c) Bending motion under 60 kPa, (d) Bending motion under 80 kPa.
at the beginning due to its rapidly changing deformation. The deformed
bending profiles provide an initial estimation of physical bending.
Afterwards, a physical experiment is performed to provide an accurate
bending profile of the soft robotic finger under various inflation inputs.
The same setup in the simulation is arranged with a high-resolution
camera to record the bending curvature corresponding to each input.
The FEA and experimental results are shown in Fig. 9.
It can be seen that most of the bending occurs at the root of the
SRF due to a larger contact area with compressed air. The bending
propagates along the longitude direction with the increase of input
pressure. The maximum inflation pressure is set to 80 kPa due to the
physical constraint in the experiment setup. The SRF bends to a near-
circle shape and is sufficient to wrap around the contour of the apple
surface under 80 kPa.
Both FEA and experiment are further conducted to test its conforma-
bility and flexibility. The robotic finger is inflated to contact the apple
in both the simulation and experimental setup. Only one finger is set
up in FEA to save computation time. The contact shape verifies the
conformability of the robotic finger. The deeper colour at the tip of the
simulated SRF indicates a compression force that tries to compress the
apple and secure its position inside the gripper.
3.2. Tip force evaluation of SRF
The tip forces exerted by the robotic fingers under various inputs are
simulated and experimentally measured. To achieve this, the fingers are
fixed at the base, with their tip end free to move under inflation. The
finger guarantees initial face-to-face contact between the SLL and the
modelled hypothetical load cell in Abaqus or the six-axis load cell in
7
Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 204 (2023) 107552
reality, as shown in Fig. 11. Once the robotic finger is pressurised, the
tip bends towards the hypothetical or actual load cell and generates the
tip force. The force is recorded 3 times with each soft robotic finger
inflated by the pressure ranging from 0 kPa to 140 kPa. A pressure
step of 20 kPa is implemented as well. Additionally, the distance 𝑑
between the SLL and the load cell is set as 0 mm, 10 mm, and 20 mm,
respectively, to evaluate the force exertion.
Detailed experimental results with tip force measured at different
distances of 20 mm, 10 mm, and 0 mm are shown in Figs. 12 (a)–
(c). The tip force increases with the increases of inflation pressures
under all three configurations. The tip force decreases when the dis-
tance 𝑑 increases because the SRF needs to deform to generate a tip
displacement before exerting the force. The maximum tip force is under
140 kPa inflation pressure when the distance equals 0 mm. A tip force
of 4.68 N is generated on the load cell. In addition, it can be seen
that the simulated and experimental results match each other well.
Both results indicate that the inflation pressure and initial configuration
highly affect the tip force.
3.3. Grasping force evaluation of gripper
The tapered SRF shows its superior performance in conformability
and force exertion and is utilised to create the four-fingered soft robotic
gripper. This section further evaluates the grasping performance of the
assembled soft robotic gripper. It is orientated with the suction cup
facing downwards to grasp a sphere with a diameter of 80 mm, as
shown in Fig. 13(a). The apple is attached and fixed to a load cell.
The envelope grasp first secures the apple after the gripper is inflated.
The critical force pulling the apple out of the gripper is recorded as
X. Wang et al. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 204 (2023) 107552

Fig. 10. (a) The simulated finger bending to conform to the apple model, (b) The experimental results for apple grasping.

Fig. 11. (a) The setup for tip force test, with load cell, (b) Different distances between the tip of the SRF and the load cell are set up.

Fig. 12. Tip force for SRF at a distance of (a) 20 mm, (b) 10 mm, (c) 0 mm.

8
X. Wang et al.
Fig. 13. (a) Experiment setup for pull-out force, (b) Results for the pull-out force to pull spheres with different diameters and under different pressures.
an evaluation index, called pull-out force. This force is tested under
various pressure inputs ranging from 20 kPa to 140 kPa and on spheres
with diameters of 70 mm, 80 mm, and 90 mm. The results are shown
in Fig. 13(b).
The experiment results suggest that a higher pull-out force is re-
quired for higher inflation pressure. The SRF can exert a higher force on
the apple’s surface to secure it. The highest force is required for a sphere
with an 80 mm diameter. Because the soft robotic finger is too long or
too short for smaller or larger spheres. When the sphere is smaller, the
inner surface of the SRF cannot fully conform to the apple’s surface. The
finger intends to bulge with the tip contacting the apple only, especially
under high pressure. On the contrary, the gripper cannot fully contain
the larger sphere within its grasping range, resulting in a lower pull-
out force. What is essential, this pull-out force is high because the apple
tries to unbend the robotic finger. A higher force is needed to unbend
the finger to a straight configuration and compensate for the friction
force during pulling. The maximum pull-out force at 140 kPa is 65.76
N. The gripper can exert high detach force due to an average apple
diameter of 75.6 mm with a flexible and conformable grasp.
In addition, the suction cup is enabled to evaluate the suction
force. The vacuum generator component provides the suction force,
generating up to −80 kPa vacuum pressure. The maximum suction force
goes up to 12 N to adhere to apples with an average size of 75.6 mm.
This suction force is not included in evaluating the overall pull-out
force because the vacuum suction is disabled once the gripper closes
and secures the apple. This early disablement of suction force is due to
the physical limitation as keeping the suction force consumes a massive
amount of airflow.
3.4. Overall performance in apple orchard
3.4.1. System initialisation and visual sensing
The system is initialised and stays at the home position before
operation. Then the mobile base is navigated to the predefined position
in the orchard and gets ready for harvesting. ROS nodes are published,
including vision, arm manipulation, and gripper control nodes.
The vision node is called to perform the fruit detection, and in-
stance segmentation on the orchard (Kang et al., 2022b), as shown
in Fig. 14(a). The calibrated LiDRA-RGB sensor set also captures the
colourised apple scene, as shown in Fig. 14(b). The 3D locations of
9
Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 204 (2023) 107552
the target apples are received from the point clouds and mapped to
the world frame. The detection of apples within the scene is saved as
masked images to evaluate the accuracy of visual detection. There are
71 apples captured in the common FoV of the RGB camera and Lidar
sensor. Among all those, 65 apples are labelled manually to evaluate the
performance of visual detection. This is because some of the occluded
or boundary apples are not feasible to grasp. The average number of
apples within one scan is 36. Our one-stage visual network work can
detect 92.3% of all those 65 pickable apples. The average inference
time for 2D segmentation is 53 ms per image. The total inference time is
213 ms to receive the 3D location of all detected apples from colourised
point clouds.
3.4.2. Fruit harvesting process
The 3D locations of the apples are utilised to plan the approaching
path for the robotic arm, and the planning success rate is also recorded
as an evaluation index. Robot Operating System’s MoveIt motion plan-
ning method is utilised to implement constrained task space planning
and configuration space trajectories. The motion planning algorithm
RRT connect and PRM∗ are combined for configuration space planning.
After the path plans, the robotic arm is manipulated to approach the
first target apple with the gripper open and suction force enabled, as
shown in Fig. 15(b). The gripper closes immediately once the suction
cup withdraws with the apple. Fig. 15(d) demonstrates the twist and
pulling off of the overall gripper to detach the apple from the apple tree.
The robotic arm then moves to the deposit position to drop the apple
into the collection bin, as shown in Figs. 15 (e) and (f). The average
planning time is 2.61 s while executing the manipulation, grasping,
moving to deposit, and releasing the gripper take an average time of
10.87 s. This can be broken down to 3.13 s, 2.08 s, 3.65 s, and 2.01 s for
each process. The suction cup extension and withdrawal take about 0.2
s individually, and the SRF takes about 2 s to open due to the limitation
of our current vacuum generator. All the apples removed from the tree
versus all the planned apples are recorded as the detachment index,
while the damage to apples, including bruises and stalk damage, are
also recorded.
3.4.3. Experimental results
In total, there are four spots where 65 apples were detected as the
test samples from the recorded orchard images, as shown in Table 2 .
X. Wang et al. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 204 (2023) 107552

Fig. 14. (a) Visual perception to detect and segment the apples (sample image), (b) LiDAR-RGB fusion to receive 3D locations of apples.

Fig. 15. The robotic harvesting process, including (a) system initialisation at home position, (b) gripper opens with suction enabled to approach the apple, (c) suction cup withdraws
and gripper closes to secure the apple, (d) Arm twists and pulls to detach the apple, (e) Arm move to deposit position, (d) Gripper releases to deposit the harvested apple.

The visual perception successfully detects and returns the 3D location
of 60 apples. Some of the apples are highly occluded by the leaves or
branches, which are not classified as the picking target and are not
considered in calculating vision detection accuracy. The path planning
algorithm generates and selects a valid approaching path for 60 target
3D locations. The arm knocks down two apples during the planning.
As a result, 58 paths are successfully executed to detach the apples.
In total, 44 apples successfully detached from the apple trees, which
is about 75.86% of the planned target apples. The detachment failure
mainly comes from the clustered apple, thick branch interference and
relative-lower torsion stiffness of the SRF. Forty-six apples were de-
tached from the tree, two of which were damaged during harvesting.
Those two apples are considered damaged due to the bruise and stalk
damage. They are also considered in the calculation of the harvesting
rate. An average cycle time of 14.69 s is required to harvest one apple.
3.5. Discussions
This study proposes a soft robotic gripper for apple harvesting in the
natural orchard. The gripper consists of four soft robotic fingers and one
suction cup with active extrusion/withdrawn and passive adaptivity. By
comparing the results of experimental and finite element modelling, the
proposed taper SRF exhibits excellent compliance and forceful output
from the tests of bending and force, respectively. The adaptivity when
grasping the apple model also demonstrates its potential for compliant
grasping. The tests on both tip force and pull-out force demonstrate an
extensive range of force exertion under various input pressures. The
suction cup also benefits the initial adhesion of apples, which makes
the following finger close and apple securing more efficient.
A downside of the pneumatic-actuated fingers is the potential failure
under long-time operation. As a 3D-printed SRF, it can last more than

10
X. Wang et al.
Table 2
Overall performance index for the proposed soft robotic gripper with the system.
Performance index Value Percentage
Total number 71 100.00%
Pickable 65 91.54%
Detection 60 92.3%
Path planning 58 96.67%
Detachment 44 75.86%
Damage 2 4.55%
Harvesting 46 70.77%
a
Including the time for planning (2.61 s), executing (3.13 s), and deposit (3.65 s).
five thousand cycles. This number can increase with the decrease of
normal operating pressure. However, this life cycle is still an issue for
autonomous fruit harvesting and needs to be addressed for the proposed
soft robotic gripper.
The bending curvature of the SRF can be optimised to maximise the
contact area. From Fig. 10, the tip of the SRF conforms to the apple
well, but the contact area decreases towards the root direction. This
is due to the uniform design parameters and material selection of the
strain limiting layer (SLL). Inverse design and multilateral fabrication
of SLL based on the contour of the apple can be an efficient way to
maximise the contact area, grasping stability and detachment rate.
Even though the suction cup show advantages of generating active
motion and passive compliance, the suction force cannot be applied
to continuously adhere apples due to a massive amount of air con-
sumption. Adding an extra vacuum pressure source can be utilised as
a compromised solution to increase the complexity of the pneumatic
control circuit and then increase the suction force’s working time. The
increased vacuum pressure value and operating time can potentially
increase the detachment and overall harvesting rates. Optimising the
pneumatic circuit is also expected to reduce the response time of the
soft gripper.
The accidentally knocked-off rate needs further reduced to prevent
undesired fruit waste. Potential optimisation on the finger design may
involve varying taper angles, fold structure and material selection.
Enabling tactile sensing capacity for the robotic fingers can also provide
feedback and assist with the current open-loop twist-pulling motion to
prevent potential knocking-down.
4. Conclusion
This work proposes a novel soft robotic gripper with tapered soft
robotic fingers and a suction cup with active motion and passive
compliance. The tapered SRF is a customised soft bending actuator from
single-step 3D printing. It shows excellent compliance and adaptivity in
apple fruits’ free bending and grasping. Further tip and pull-out force
tests indicate promising force exertion. A maximum pull-out force of
65.76 N can be generated on an 80 mm sphere under 140 kPa inflation
pressure. To assist the grasping sequence, the suction cup can also show
different modes, such as suction adhesion, active extrusion, passive
compliance and active withdrawal. An effective detachment method
of simultaneously twist-pulling is implemented to remove the apples
from the trees. Comprehensive field tests have been conducted with
the proposed soft robotic gripper and overall system to validate the
efficiency. The experiment results suggest a 75.86% detachment rate
and around 4.55% damage rate are achieved. Further improvements are
planned to advance the design, material, and structure of the proposed
soft robotic fingers, together with the control of the pneumatic system.
In addition, more experiments should also be conducted to provide a
more comprehensive evaluation of the harvesting performance of the
overall system.
Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 204 (2023) 107552
Average time /s Note
– Apples within recorded data
– Pickable apples as labelled manually
0.213 Detection results from vision
9.39a Two apples knocked down during planning
2.08 All the apples removed are counted
– Including bruise and stalk damage
14.69 Including all detached apples
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Xing Wang: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Simula-
tion, Validation, Writing – original draft. Hanwen Kang: Conceptu-
alization, Methodology, Data curation, Validation, Writing – original
draft. Hongyu Zhou: CAD design, Validation. Wesley Au: Conceptual-
ization, Validation. Michael Yu Wang: Writing – review & editing, Su-
pervision. Chao Chen: Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing,
Supervision, Project administration.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing finan-
cial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to
influence the work reported in this paper.
Data availability
Data will be made available on request.
Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the Aus-
tralian Research Council (ARC ITRH IH150100006). Additionally, Dr
Xing Wang would like to thank the funding support from CSIRO’s CERC
program. We also thank Mr Ruijie Zhang at Monash University for his
help with the experiment.
References
Birrell, S., Hughes, J., Cai, J.Y., Iida, F., 2020. A field-tested robotic harvesting system
for iceberg lettuce. J. Field Robotics 37 (2), 225–245.
Bogue, R., 2020. Fruit picking robots: has their time come? Ind. Robot Int. J. Robot.
Res. Appl.
Chen, F., Wang, M.Y., 2020. Design optimization of soft robots: A review of the state
of the art. IEEE Robot. Autom. Mag. 27 (4), 27–43.
Davidson, J.R., Silwal, A., Hohimer, C.J., Karkee, M., Mo, C., Zhang, Q., 2016. Proof-of-
concept of a robotic apple harvester. In: 2016 IEEE/RSJ International Conference
on Intelligent Robots and Systems. IROS, IEEE, pp. 634–639.
Dilibal, S., Sahin, H., Celik, Y., 2018. Experimental and numerical analysis on the
bending response of the geometrically gradient soft robotics actuator. Arch. Mech.
70 (5), 391–404.
Elfferich, J.F., Dodou, D., Della Santina, C., 2022. Soft robotic grippers for crop handling
or harvesting: A review. IEEE Access 10, 75428–75443.
Fan, P., Yan, B., Wang, M., Lei, X., Liu, Z., Yang, F., 2021. Three-finger grasp planning
and experimental analysis of picking patterns for robotic apple harvesting. Comput.
Electron. Agric. 188, 106353.
Gao, J., Zhang, F., Zhang, J., Yuan, T., Yin, J., Guo, H., Yang, C., 2022. Development
and evaluation of a pneumatic finger-like end-effector for cherry tomato harvesting
robot in greenhouse. Comput. Electron. Agric. 197, 106879.
Hohimer, C.J., Wang, H., Bhusal, S., Miller, J., Mo, C., Karkee, M., 2019. Design and
field evaluation of a robotic apple harvesting system with a 3D-printed soft-robotic
end-effector. Trans. ASABE 62 (2), 405–414.
Hu, G., Chen, C., Chen, J., Sun, L., Sugirbay, A., Chen, Y., Jin, H., Zhang, S., Bu, L.,
2022. Simplified 4-DOF manipulator for rapid robotic apple harvesting. Comput.
Electron. Agric. 199, 107177.
Hua, Y., Zhang, N., Yuan, X., Quan, L., Yang, J., Nagasaka, K., Zhou, X.-G., 2019.
Recent advances in intelligent automated fruit harvesting robots. Open Agric. J.
13 (1).
11
X. Wang et al.
Ji, W., Pan, Y., Xu, B., Wang, J., 2022a. A real-time apple targets detection method
for picking robot based on ShufflenetV2-YOLOX. Agriculture 12 (6), 856.
Ji, W., Tang, C., Xu, B., He, G., 2022b. Contact force modeling and variable damping
impedance control of apple harvesting robot. Comput. Electron. Agric. 198, 107026.
Ji, W., Zhang, J., Xu, B., Tang, C., Zhao, D., 2021. Grasping mode analysis and adaptive
impedance control for apple harvesting robotic grippers. Comput. Electron. Agric.
186, 106210.
Junge, K., Hughes, J., 2022. Soft sensorized physical twin for harvesting raspberries.
In: 2022 IEEE 5th International Conference on Soft Robotics. RoboSoft, IEEE, pp.
601–606.
Kang, M., Fan, Z., Yu, X., Wan, H., Chen, Q., Wang, P., Fu, L., 2022a. Division-
merge based inverse kinematics for multi-DOFs humanoid robots in unstructured
environments. Comput. Electron. Agric. 198, 107090.
Kang, H., Wang, X., Chen, C., 2022b. Accurate fruit localisation using high resolution
LiDAR-camera fusion and instance segmentation. Comput. Electron. Agric. 203,
107450.
Kang, H., Zhou, H., Wang, X., Chen, C., 2020. Real-time fruit recognition and grasping
estimation for robotic apple harvesting. Sensors 20 (19), 5670.
Kim, B., Lee, S.B., Lee, J., Cho, S., Park, H., Yeom, S., Park, S.H., 2012. A com-
parison among Neo-Hookean model, Mooney-Rivlin model, and Ogden model for
chloroprene rubber. Int. J. Precis. Eng. Manuf. 13 (5), 759–764.
Kumar, N., Rao, V.V., 2016. Hyperelastic Mooney-Rivlin model: determination and
physical interpretation of material constants. Parameters 2 (10), 01.
Kurtser, P., Edan, Y., 2020. Planning the sequence of tasks for harvesting robots. Robot.
Auton. Syst. 131, 103591.
Larue, B., 2020. Labor issues and COVID-19. Can. J. Agric. Econ./Revue Canad.
D’Agroeconomie 68 (2), 231–237.
Liu, J., Peng, Y., Faheem, M., 2020. Experimental and theoretical analysis of fruit
plucking patterns for robotic tomato harvesting. Comput. Electron. Agric. 173,
105330.
Ma, S., Karkee, M., Scharf, P.A., Zhang, Q., 2014. Sugarcane harvester technology: a
critical overview. Appl. Eng. Agric. 30 (5), 727–739.
Navas, E., Fernández, R., Sepúlveda, D., Armada, M., Gonzalez-de Santos, P., 2021. Soft
grippers for automatic crop harvesting: A review. Sensors 21 (8), 2689.
Peng, Y., Liu, Y., Yang, Y., Yang, Y., Liu, N., Sun, Y., et al., 2018. Research progress
on application of soft robotic gripper in fruit and vegetable picking. Trans. Chin.
Soc. Agric. Eng. 34 (9), 11–20.
12
Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 204 (2023) 107552
Pinskier, J., Howard, D., 2022. From bioinspiration to computer generation:
Developments in autonomous soft robot design. Adv. Intell. Syst. 4 (1), 2100086.
Rus, D., Tolley, M.T., 2015. Design, fabrication and control of soft robots. Nature 521
(7553), 467–475.
Tang, Y., Chen, M., Wang, C., Luo, L., Li, J., Lian, G., Zou, X., 2020. Recognition and
localization methods for vision-based fruit picking robots: A review. Front. Plant
Sci. 11, 510.
Tougeron, K., Hance, T., 2021. Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on apple orchards
in Europe. Agric. Syst. 190, 103097.
Wang, X., Kang, H., Zhou, H., Au, W., Chen, C., 2022. Geometry-aware fruit grasping
estimation for robotic harvesting in apple orchards. Comput. Electron. Agric. 193,
106716.
Wang, X., Khara, A., Chen, C., 2020. A soft pneumatic bistable reinforced actuator
bioinspired by Venus Flytrap with enhanced grasping capability. Bioinspiration
Biomim. 15 (5), 056017.
Wang, X., Zhou, H., Kang, H., Au, W., Chen, C., 2021. Bio-inspired soft bistable actuator
with dual actuations. Smart Mater. Struct. 30 (12), 125001.
Williams, H.A., Jones, M.H., Nejati, M., Seabright, M.J., Bell, J., Penhall, N.D.,
Barnett, J.J., Duke, M.D., Scarfe, A.J., Ahn, H.S., et al., 2019. Robotic kiwifruit
harvesting using machine vision, convolutional neural networks, and robotic arms.
Biosyst. Eng. 181, 140–156.
Xavier, M.S., Fleming, A.J., Yong, Y.K., 2021. Finite element modeling of soft fluidic
actuators: Overview and recent developments. Adv. Intell. Syst. 3 (2), 2000187.
Zhang, Z., Igathinathane, C., Li, J., Cen, H., Lu, Y., Flores, P., 2020a. Technology
progress in mechanical harvest of fresh market apples. Comput. Electron. Agric.
175, 105606.
Zhang, B., Xie, Y., Zhou, J., Wang, K., Zhang, Z., 2020b. State-of-the-art robotic
grippers, grasping and control strategies, as well as their applications in agricultural
robots: A review. Comput. Electron. Agric. 177, 105694.
Zhao, D., Lv, J., Ji, W., Zhang, Y., Chen, Y., 2011. Design and control of an apple
harvesting robot. Biosyst. Eng. 110 (2), 112–122.
Zheng, W., Xie, Y., Zhang, B., Zhou, J., Zhang, J., 2021. Dexterous robotic grasping of
delicate fruits aided with a multi-sensory e-glove and manual grasping analysis for
damage-free manipulation. Comput. Electron. Agric. 190, 106472.
Zhou, H., Wang, X., Au, W., Kang, H., Chen, C., 2022. Intelligent robots for fruit
harvesting: Recent developments and future challenges. Precis. Agric. 1–52.