From Simulation to the Real-World: An In-Field 6D Pose Dataset and Baseline for Robotic Strawberry Harvesting

This study presents a closed-loop robotic strawberry harvesting system that combines a robust vision module, simulation-trained deep reinforcement learning (DRL) control, and ROS-based realrobot execution. For perception, we propose HRAttnEdge-YOLO26-seg, a modified YOLO26-seg architecture that incorporates a high-resolution P2 branch, segmentation-path attention, and edgesupervised prototype learning to improve instance segmentation in cluttered scenes. For control, we train a target-conditioned Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) policy in Isaac Lab to produce smooth joint-position commands for a UR10e manipulator and deploy it on a UR10e robot for targetfruit reaching and harvesting. This simulation-based approach reduces hardware dependency, lowers development cost, and allows scalable policy training without exhaustive physical trials before real deployment. The proposed vision model demonstrated the highest overall performance among the evaluated methods. On both self-collected and public datasets, the model showed a 10 to 14% improvement in segmentation performance. In controlled in-house tests, the PPO controller produced stable and dynamically smoother motion than a inverse kinematics (IK)-based MoveIt baseline. In greenhouse trials, the proposed integrated system harvested 281 strawberries, achieving 96.6% reaching success, 91.3% grasp-and-pull success, and 84.3% overall harvesting success. These results illustrate that task-specific perception combined with simulation-trained PPO can serve as a practical and resource-efficient alternative to conventional planner-dependent reaching in manipulation, enabling reliable closed-loop robotic harvesting in complex agricultural environments.

Agricultural robotics is advancing rapidly, yet progress remains constrained by limited field access, lack of control over field conditions, geographic variability, and seasonal crop cycles. These factors make it difficult and costly to acquire diverse agricultural datasets, resulting in limited evaluation and reduced system robustness. While other robotics domains have scaled learning and evaluation through high-fidelity simulation, agricultural robotics still lacks comparably capable tools. In this paper, we present a ROS-integrated framework, built on Isaac Sim, for large-scale procedural generation of agricultural environments. The framework supports photorealistic rendering, physics simulation, and domain randomization at scales relevant to robotics research, with built-in support for row crops, orchards, and vineyards and straightforward extensibility to additional crop categories. Project Page: https://baj31415.github.io/agrigen/

Severe occlusions and deformable plant structures introduce complex contact dynamics that challenge robotic strawberry harvesting. A policy-driven reinforcement learning (RL) framework with heuristic phase coordination was developed, in which obstacle separation, fruit detachment, and placement were formulated as a sequential decision-making task. A shared interaction-aware policy generated Cartesian motions across all task phases, while lightweight heuristic logic coordinated task progression and gripper events. A shared structured observation space was used to represent target, obstacle, end-effector, and task-context information. A hierarchical architecture combined the high-level policy with low-level Cartesian impedance control for compliant interaction. To support zero-shot sim-to-real transfer, feasibility-first observation alignment and domain randomization were adopted. The policy achieved success rates of 89.7% in simulation and 82.0% in real-world experiments. As the occlusion level increased from 1 to 5, the average execution time increased from 12.99 s to 21.73 s, reflecting greater interaction complexity. These results demonstrated effective transfer of interaction-aware harvesting behaviors to a structurally different robotic platform.