An analysis of sensor selection for fruit picking with suction-based grippers

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Krueger, Eva, Rosette, Marcus, Davidson, Joseph R.
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Krueger, Eva
Rosette, Marcus
Davidson, Joseph R.
author_facet Krueger, Eva
Rosette, Marcus
Davidson, Joseph R.
contents Robotic fruit harvesting often fails to reliably detect whether a fruit has been successfully picked, limiting efficiency and increasing crop damage. This problem is difficult due to compliant fruit and grippers, variable stem attachment, and occlusions in orchard environments. Prior work has explored vision-based perception and multi-sensor learning approaches for pick state estimation. However, minimal sensor sets and phase-dependent sensing strategies for accurate pick and slip detection remain largely unexplored. In this work, we design and evaluate a multimodal sensing suite integrated into a compliant suction-based apple gripper. Our approach is unique because it identifies which sensors are most informative at different phases of the pick, enabling predictive detection of failures before they occur. The contributions of this paper are a phase-dependent evaluation of multimodal sensors and the identification of minimal sensor sets for reliable pick state classification. Experiments in a real apple orchard show that Random Forest and Multilayer Perceptron classifiers detect successful picks and impending failures with over 90% accuracy, and Random Forest predicts pick/slip events within 0.09 s of human-annotated ground truth.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_24906
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An analysis of sensor selection for fruit picking with suction-based grippers
Krueger, Eva
Rosette, Marcus
Davidson, Joseph R.
Robotics
Machine Learning
Systems and Control
Robotic fruit harvesting often fails to reliably detect whether a fruit has been successfully picked, limiting efficiency and increasing crop damage. This problem is difficult due to compliant fruit and grippers, variable stem attachment, and occlusions in orchard environments. Prior work has explored vision-based perception and multi-sensor learning approaches for pick state estimation. However, minimal sensor sets and phase-dependent sensing strategies for accurate pick and slip detection remain largely unexplored. In this work, we design and evaluate a multimodal sensing suite integrated into a compliant suction-based apple gripper. Our approach is unique because it identifies which sensors are most informative at different phases of the pick, enabling predictive detection of failures before they occur. The contributions of this paper are a phase-dependent evaluation of multimodal sensors and the identification of minimal sensor sets for reliable pick state classification. Experiments in a real apple orchard show that Random Forest and Multilayer Perceptron classifiers detect successful picks and impending failures with over 90% accuracy, and Random Forest predicts pick/slip events within 0.09 s of human-annotated ground truth.
title An analysis of sensor selection for fruit picking with suction-based grippers
topic Robotics
Machine Learning
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.24906