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This paper introduces a novel approach to robotic fruit harvesting that utilizes a sensorless control method to ensure safe grasping without bruising produce, addressing the challenge of varying compression stiffness due to ripeness. By bounding deformation through a user-specified limit on compression strain, the controller effectively manages grip force using only encoder position and motor effort signals, eliminating the need for tactile sensors. The method achieves over 98% grasp success with zero damage across a range of stiffnesses in simulation, significantly outperforming traditional fixed-force methods in both efficiency and safety.
A sensorless control strategy enables robotic grasping that maintains over 98% success with zero damage, even as fruit ripeness varies.
Robotic fruit harvesting must hold produce securely without bruising it, yet compression stiffness varies several-fold with ripeness within a single species, so no fixed grip force spans the range. Rather than tune force, we bound deformation: a controller closes the gripper until the object's estimated compression strain reaches a user-specified limit $\varepsilon$, using only the encoder position and motor-effort signal on every servo gripper---no tactile or force-torque sensor. Dividing an effort-based contact force by a lower bound on object stiffness makes the stop provably conservative---true compression stays at or below $\varepsilon$---for any $\varepsilon$ above a contact-detection strain floor we identify and quantify: robust detection itself spends compression, linearly in closing speed, making speed an explicit throughput--gentleness knob. Unlike a hand-tuned force threshold, $\varepsilon$ is a certified, size-scaling, operator-interpretable damage limit, and a ready safe-action parameter for learned grasping policies. In MuJoCo simulation over a realistic fruit-stiffness range, under a sensor-noise model calibrated to the real servo, the controller holds $\ge 98\,\%$ grasp at $0\,\%$ damage across all medium-to-firm stiffnesses for the entire certified $\varepsilon$ range, which neither fixed-force baseline attains; on stiffness-graded 3D-printed TPU cubes it matches baseline grasp success at roughly half the grip force and cuts soft-object damage from $100\,\%$ to $40\,\%$.