Cloud-Based Smart Coordinated Robot System for Strawberry Harvesting in Controlled Greenhouse Environment

The growing global population has intensified the need for automating agricultural harvesting to meet increasing food demands. Researchers are now focused on developing solutions that are both cost-effective and efficient to tackle these challenges. Harvesting robots are a promising option, but most existing models are either costly, inefficient, or both. This is partly because these robots must individually handle all the necessary tasks, including plant data collection, data processing, and the actual harvesting of ripe fruits. Moreover, their requirement for powerful hardware to enable real-time data processing further drives up costs. In this paper, we propose a novel system that distributes these tasks between two robots: Robot-A for data collection and Robot-B for harvesting. Additionally, we integrate cloud computing to not only coordinate the robots but also to handle the data processing performed by Robot-A. By leveraging the cloud's hardware resources, we aim to enhance the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the harvesting process. We demonstrate the system's functionality through a simulated tabletop strawberry greenhouse. In the experiment, Robot-A collects plant data using a depth camera and transmits it to the cloud server. The data is processed and stored in the cloud database, taking only 1.76 seconds, illustrating the potential of integrating cloud computing with harvesting systems to overcome the limitations of current harvesting robots.