Human Evaluation of Robotic Grippers for Berry Picking

Abstract

We describe the construction and evaluation of two robotic grippers for berry picking. Using a pneumatic cylinder drive, one was constructed from hard materials and the other from soft materials. A novel evaluation paradigm using a handle mechanism was developed, so the grippers could be directly operated by human participants. An artificial bush was also constructed and used for evaluation purposes. Overall, both grippers performed worse than the human hand, indicating that further development is needed