In robotic harvesting, a gripper to manipulate the fruits needs to be attached to the robot system. We proposed a flexible robot gripper that can actively respond to the shape of an object such as fruits in the previous work. However, we found that there is a possibility of not being reliably gripped when the object slides during contact with a finger. In this paper, the improved gripper design is proposed to fundamentally solve the problems of the previous gripper. The position of the finger and the maximum closed position are changed, and the design improvement is performed to increase the grip stability by changing the installation angle of the link portion of the finger. Based on the improved design, a modified gripper is fabricated by 3-D printing, and then gripping experiments are performed on spherical object and fruit model object. It is shown that the gripper can stably grip the objects without excessive bending of the finger link of the gripper. The contact pressure between the finger and the surface of the object is measured, and it is verified that it is a sufficiently small pressure that does not cause damage to the fruit. Therefore, the proposed gripper is expected to be successfully applied in harvesting.

In the agricultural field, interests in research using robots for fruit harvesting are continuously increasing. Dual arm manipulators are promising because of its abilities like task-distribution and role-sharing. To operate it efficiently, the task sequence must be planned adequately. In our previous study, a collision-free path planning method based on a genetic algorithm is proposed for dual arm manipulators doing tasks cooperatively. However, in order to simplify the complicated collision-check problem, the movement between tasks of two robots should be synchronized, and thus there is a problem that the robots must wait and resume their movement. In this paper, we propose a heuristic algorithm that can reduce the total time of the optimal solution obtained by using the previously proposed genetic algorithm. It iteratively desynchronizes the task sequence of two robots and reduces the waiting time. For evaluation, the proposed algorithm is applied to the same work as the previous study. As a result, we can obtain a faster solution having 22.57 s than that of the previous study having 24.081 s. It will be further studied to apply the proposed algorithm to the fruit harvesting.

In this paper, we proposed a method to determine the acceleration/deceleration time of the motion for reducing the residual vibration caused by the resonance of the robot in the high-speed motion. The relationship between the acceleration/deceleration time and the residual vibration was discussed for the trapezoidal velocity profile by analyzing the time when the jerk happens. The natural frequency of the robot can be estimated in advance through the dynamics simulation. The simulation and experiment for both cases where the moving distance of the robot is long enough and the distance is short, are implemented in the 1-DOF linear robot. Simulation and experimental results show that when the acceleration/deceleration time is a multiple of the vibration period, the settling time and the amplitude of the residual vibration become less than when the time is not a multiple.

Robots have been widely used for the education in kindergarten and elementary school. In this study, the cognition of parents on robots in education is investigated. The study is conducted by analyzing responses of 105 parents with kindergarten students and elementary schoolchildren. The survey results show that most students who have been taking the robotics education start it fromfive or seven years old. The students were mainly educated in the private institution. Therefore, the parents worry about the lack of professionalism about educational institute and teachers. In conclusion, the systematic curriculums and policy of robotic education are needed for kindergarten students and elementary students.