Abstract:For strawberry harvesting, when strawberries are overlapping or covered by leaves, high positional accuracy of end-effector is required and the recognition and detection algorithm is very complex and time-consuming, otherwise the strawberries will be abandoned. To solve the problem mentioned above, a large misalignment tolerance end-effector, which can be used for picking up multi strawberries at one time, was designed. The end-effector, using the harvesting method of collecting strawberries down to up and away from obstacle, clamping and cutting stems, was composed of a collecting-clamping cutting device and profiling ridge device. The end effector was mounted on harvesting manipulators. Experiments were conducted and results showed that the proposed end effector had satisfactory performance when positional error in the range of ±7mm, and could pick up three ripe strawberries at one time without separating overlapped ripe strawberries; while fruits area containing single fruit, two fruits, or three fruits, the average time of picking one time respectively was 2.00s, 2.13s, 2.28s, and the success ratio of harvesting was no less than 97.7%.