Development of a Table-top Cultivation System for Robot Strawberry Harvesting

Cultivating a greenhouse strawberry system for a harvesting robot should help profitability by boosting yields and labor-saving. We have developed a high-density cultivation system utilizing movable hanging beds that hold 1.5 times the number of plants of conventional table-top systems. With the proposed system, nine beds could be placed in a greenhouse 8 m wide, whereas only six beds would fit into a conventional system. The hanging beds move parallel to each other on a two-wheeled frame travelling on a greenhouse beam approximately 2 m above the floor. Although the usual greenhouse aisle width between strawberry beds is 0.5 m, this automatically expands to approximately 1 m when the robot enters the aisle. The operation is currently performed manually by pressing a switch. The strawberry yield achieved with the mobile system was 1.5 times that obtained with fixed hanging beds. Our next project involves developing a low-clearance moving platform on which a robot can move.