Automated Bell Pepper Harvesting using Robotic Vision System

In recent years automatic vision based technology has become important to many areas including agricultural fields and food industry. Robotic harvesting offers an attractive solution to reducing labour costs while enabling more regular and selective harvesting techniques. The automation technology used in harvesting the yellow bell pepper makes use of open source computer vision platform to detect the crop amidst the foliage using various image processing techniques and send appropriate signals to move the robot to harvest the crop. The web camera feeds real time images to the microcontroller where the digital image is filtered to remove noise and subjected to various feature extraction such as colour detection and size determination and the processed image is displayed over the internet .The detected bell pepper can be harvested by moving the robot with appropriate commands sent over a web application which serves as a communication platform between the user and the robot interfaced using the Bluetooth module.