Dual-Arm Collaborative Tea Bud Harvesting System

YANG Yutong; JIANG Zhaoliang; ZHU Xinrui; REN Changxu; ZHU Liang; DAI Huawen

doi:10.13305/j.cnki.jts.2026.04.011

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Journal of Tea Science ›› 2026, Vol. 46 ›› Issue (4) : 708-720. DOI: 10.13305/j.cnki.jts.2026.04.011

Research Paper

Dual-Arm Collaborative Tea Bud Harvesting System

YANG Yutong¹, JIANG Zhaoliang^1,2,3,*, ZHU Xinrui¹, REN Changxu¹, ZHU Liang¹, DAI Huawen¹

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Abstract

In light of the low efficiency of premium tea harvesting and the insufficient research on dual-arm task allocation and path planning in existing studies, this study used a common-rail gantry dual-arm harvesting platform as the experimental carrier and proposed a dual-arm collaborative task planning and scheduling method for tea bud harvesting. For multi-target tea bud harvesting tasks, a hybrid path planning algorithm based on GA-2Opt was proposed and combined with a region partitioning strategy guided by time costs to achieve adaptive load balancing between the two arms. Meanwhile, an active collision avoidance scheduling mechanism based on temporal sequences was introduced to mitigate interference conflicts in the dual-arm system at the planning layer. Field experiments demonstrate a picking success rate of approximately 79.7% and an average dual-arm parallelism rate of 93.3%. Compared with traditional partitioning strategies, the system significantly reduced total operating time, with an average picking cycle time of 1.39 s per tea bud. These findings validate the robustness of the collaborative strategy in unstructured environments, and provide a high-efficiency solution for automated premium tea harvesting.

Key words

dual-arm collaboration / tea bud picking / path planning / task allocation

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YANG Yutong, JIANG Zhaoliang, ZHU Xinrui, REN Changxu, ZHU Liang, DAI Huawen. Dual-Arm Collaborative Tea Bud Harvesting System[J]. Journal of Tea Science. 2026, 46(4): 708-720 https://doi.org/10.13305/j.cnki.jts.2026.04.011

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