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The two main goals of this research are the development of a harvesting robot and the improvements brought in the present high-wire cultivation cucumber plant system. The mobile robot consists of a vehicle for course positioning of the robot, a manipulator and an end-effector. Aspects like working time, number of robots in a standard 2-ha cucumber nursery, and technologies used to detect, classify and locate the cucumber within its environment will also be discussed in this paper.

The detection of the position of an individual plant in a row of sugar beet is discussed. Precise detection of the position is necessary for efficient mechanical weed control in the row in the growing of sugar beet. It is shown that with a simple sensor consisting of a combination of infrared light sources and photoelectric cells, together with some signal procesing, it is possible to reconstruct the individual positions of the sugar beet plants from the measured data, even despite the presence of weed in the row. The signal processing methods used are correlation and fast Fourier transform (FFT) techniques.