constructed, its successfulness could not be evaluated. Also, the control problems were only

assumed and never actually encountered.

 The application of robotics in fruit harvesting has also been investigated by

researchers at the Laboratory of Agricultural Machinery in Kyoto, Japan (Kawamura et al.,

1985; Kawamura et al., 1986). This work involved the design of a five degree-of-freedom

manipulator for picking tomatoes and oranges. A global color vision system was employed for

the detection of fruit. The camera was mounted on a vertical support and could be moved up or

down the support. An image was acquired with the camera in one location and then the camera

was moved for acquisition of a second image. The two images were analyzed and the centroids

of the fruit in the image were determined. The three-dimensional positions of the fruit were

calculated from the two-dimensional images by triangulation. A trajectory to each of the fruits

and the robot joint angles required to follow the desired path to a fruit were calculated. As the

arm approached the calculated position of the fruit, the speed of the joints was slowed. When

the hand reached the calculated position of the fruit, the fruit was gripped and severed from

its supporting stem. Three-fingered flexible hands were built for use with the manipulator

(Kawamura et al., 1987). These hands provided gripping forces similar to those of a human

hand while picking tomatoes and oranges. Image processing and joint motion calculations were

rather extensive, causing the picking time for one fruit to be approximately 20 sec.

 Harrell et al. (1985) examined the concept of real-time vision-servoing for controlling

the manipulator during the picking process. This work involved the use of a commercially

available spherical coordinate (RRP) robot. A small black-and-white camera was mounted in

the end-effector of the robot and aligned with the axis of the prismatic joint. With this

configuration, a fruit whose image was centered in the camera's image plane was directly in

front of the end-effector. Thus, the end-effector could be extended towards the fruit. Since the

vision-servoing was kept active during the picking process, any motions of the fruit could be

followed by making changes in the two revolute joints. In this first generation, signals from the

control computer were sent directly to the electric robot controller for serving the positions of