Identification of fruit using a flexible tactile sensor array

This article aims to address the issue of low recognition accuracy in existing sorting robots caused by lighting, occlusion, and environmental factors. A fruit recognition method based on a flexible tactile sensor array is described. This method enables the robot to directly perceive the attributes of the objects and identify fruits using a flexible gripper, facilitating intelligent sorting. A novel flexible tactile sensor array is utilized to construct a flexible hand tactile information acquisition platform, which collects tactile time series data for the fruits. Principal component analysis is then employed for dimensionality reduction, followed by the development of an improved particle swarm optimization for the support vector machine model. Through an experimental study, the optimized model is compared with four other models, demonstrating better classification performance. The optimized model achieves an average tactile classification accuracy of up to 98.10% for the five types of fruits. A comparison between the improved optimization algorithm, genetic algorithm, and grid search algorithm reveals the superior optimization performance of the new approach. In the future, this method is expected to be implemented in industrial sorting robots for intelligent sorting on automatic production lines. Furthermore, the algorithm will be further refined to enhance the classification accuracy and efficiency.