Pedicel-Targeted Strawberry Harvesting via Imitation Learning on a Low-Cost Teleoperated Robotic Arm
Precise pedicel-targeted grasping in strawberry harvesting remains a critical bottleneck due to the pedicel's small diameter (1.3-3 mm), color similarity with surrounding foliage, and precise force control required for clean abscission zone detachment. As a market-grade crop, strawberry aesthetic value makes bruise-free pedicel detachment essential over direct fruit grasping. Classical approaches struggle to unify vision models, motion planning, and contact manipulation into a robust framework, particularly in occluded canopy environments. Therefore, this work presents a visuomotor imitation learning pipeline for pedicel-targeted strawberry harvesting that unifies perception, motion planning, and contact manipulation from collecting human teleoperation demonstrations, training an Action Chunking with Transformers (ACT) policy with a ResNet-50 visual backbone, and deploying the learned policy autonomously on a Jetson AGX Orin edge platform at 15 Hz. The trained policy achieved consistent loss convergence from 2.84 to 0.091 over 100K gradient steps on 130 demonstrations. We have also established a reproducible open-source pipeline with publicly released dataset and model weights for the agricultural robotics community. Full dataset is available at, https://huggingface.co/datasets/nitindominicrai/strawberry_pedicel_grasp_teleoperation and trained policy at, https://huggingface.co/nitindominicrai/act_strawberry_pedicel. To replicate this work, all code, configurations, and deployment instructions are publicly available at, https://github.com/nitin-dominic/autonomous_strawberry_pedicel_harvesting.