Design, development and evaluation of latex harvesting robot based on flexible Toggle

Abstract Natural rubber latex is an important energy material. However, the harvest of latex is still manual, and there are few researches on automatic work. This paper proposed a method for robot to harvest from each rubber tree without stopping. The robot toggled the collection cup through the flexible actuator, the cup poured out the latex and rotated to the next collection position. In this way, it not only completed the harvest work, but also prepared for the next collection. Aiming at the problem of latex splashing during rapid toggle, the structural parameters of the collection cup and the flexible actuator were modeled and studied. This method made the rotation speed of the collection cup smoother and avoids splashing. To enable the robot to accurately complete the harvesting work, this paper used two-dimensional Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and ranging sensor to locate the space position of the collection cup. The results show that when the toggle speed is 0.5 m/s and the latex volume is 300 ml, the average shaking height is 3.58 mm. In the field test, the lateral error of positioning is less than 8.86 mm, and the height error is less than 0.72 mm; the average harvest rate is 98.18%. The robot has high efficiency and good stability, and can be applied to the rubber plantation to harvest automatically.

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