Berry Gentle: Design and Evaluation of a Soft Robotic Gripper for Strawberry Harvesting

Overview

Every year, California growers lose 17% of their crops to poor handling, and a shortage of 2.4 million workers makes harvesting difficult. I addressed this by designing and evaluating a sustainable robotic infrastructure to pick delicate strawberries. My project compares a custom-built "soft" robotic gripper to a traditional "hard" gripper. I hypothesized that my air-powered soft gripper would be safer for the fruit but slower than a motor-driven hard gripper. To test this, I built a robotic gripper (end effector) with inflatable silicone fingers. These were connected to a robotic arm using a custom 3D-printed hub that channeled air into the fingers' air chambers. I conducted a controlled experiment comparing an off-the-shelf hard gripper to my custom soft gripper on the task of picking and moving strawberries, measuring success and speed as well as damage to the fruit. The results supported my hypothesis that the soft gripper would cause less damage; it protected 100% of the fruit, while the hard gripper damaged 20%. However, the soft gripper was slightly faster, disproving my speed hypothesis. Additionally, both grippers had similar success in moving fruit to the target. These results could benefit the California strawberry industry, which grows 90% of the nation’s crop. Soft robots can save millions of pounds of food from damage and address labor shortages. Most importantly, these robots can work in demanding conditions - such as bending low to the ground or moving through pesticides - and prevent the back injuries that affect 70% of farmworkers.

Competition history

• CSEF 2026 Environmental Engineering (Track 2) (Junior Division) · Entry J-12-18

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