Design of the electrical and mechanical control system of an end effector for a robot specialized in cocoa harvesting

Perú is one of the main cocoa producers in Latin America due to the peculiar aroma of its beans, however the harvesting process of this fruit is still manual. The objective of this work is to design and simulate the mechanical, electrical and control system for a specialized cocoa harvesting gripper, which will allow to hold and exert torque on the cocoa fruit for its extraction. The design process was developed according to the German VDI 2221 standard; in this sense, the tasks to be fulfilled by the robotic gripper, the function structure for these tasks, the possible technical solutions for the functions, the exact delimitation of the modules for the chosen solution, the mathematical and technical development for these modules and finally the presentation of the overall design were defined. The results for mechanical stress and fatigue as well as for electrical control, simulated in SolidWork and Proteus, support the proposed design; therefore, its coherence is confirmed by contrasting the mathematical calculations with the data obtained through these simulators, making the design technologically feasible.