Detection of Hand Strength Distribution with E-Textile-Based Tactile Glove for Peach Harvesting

Abstract

In recent years, the aging of agricultural workers has become more serious due to the declining birthrate and aging population. Thus, fewer people are teaching young people harvesting techniques, such as how to pick a peach from the tree. So far, such training practice is proofed to be costly since its unit price is high (e.g. each one costs about two to five USD in Japan) and the peach is prone to be damaged for incorrect pick approach. Moreover, for the correct pick approach, it requires to distribute the force over the hand to avoid damaging the delicate peach. But for the traditional training method, a learner needs to repeat the trial-and-error process to get the correct hand feeling since the hand force is invisible. In this paper, to visualize the hand force, we propose a E-textile tactile glove. The glove is sewed with soft piezo-resistive sensors which can detect 26 points of force all over the hand. And a 2D GUI is designed for hand force visualization. According to the qualitative experiments, the tactile glove can detect and visualize the hand strength distribution in real time.