Design of a Low-Cost Robotic Prototype for Fruit Harvest with Flexible Gripping Using 3D Printing

The need to accelerate the speed of food production has increased in recent years due to a series of multiple economic, political, and social factors. Therefore, a trend has emerged toward developing systems that allow increased production or food harvesting speeds. In this context, a prototype fruit harvesting robotic arm was designed. It consists of a system consist of four Nema 17 stepper motors and four 360-degree servomotors. The arm is built with a Three-degree-of-freedom system to reduce its complexity and allow easy replication. For the same reason, the prototype was built using 3D printing and PLA filament, and flexible TPU filament was used for the gripper. The paper includes the respective force and torque calculations to ensure the robotic arm’s operation, despite using simple and low-cost electronic components. A statistical analysis is also included to determine the arm’s efficiency. The results obtained demonstrate that the technology could be implemented and has potential for use in agricultural applications.