Real-Time Recognition and Localization Based on Improved YOLOv5s for Robot’s Picking Clustered Fruits of Chilies

Chili recognition is one of the critical technologies for robots to pick chilies. The robots need locate the fruit. Furthermore, chilies are always planted intensively and their fruits are always clustered. It is a challenge to recognize and locate the chilies that are blocked by branches and leaves, or other chilies. However, little is known about the recognition algorithms considering this situation. Failure to solve this problem will mean that the robot cannot accurately locate and collect chilies, which may even damage the picking robot’s mechanical arm and end effector. Additionally, most of the existing ground target recognition algorithms are relatively complex, and there are many problems, such as numerous parameters and calculations. Many of the existing models have high requirements for hardware and poor portability. It is very difficult to perform these algorithms if the picking robots have limited computing and battery power. In view of these practical issues, we propose a target recognition-location scheme GNPD-YOLOv5s based on improved YOLOv5s in order to automatically identify the occluded and non-occluded chilies. Firstly, the lightweight optimization for Ghost module is introduced into our scheme. Secondly, pruning and distilling the model is designed to further reduce the number of parameters. Finally, the experimental data show that compared with the YOLOv5s model, the floating point operation number of the GNPD-YOLOv5s scheme is reduced by 40.9%, the model size is reduced by 46.6%, and the reasoning speed is accelerated from 29 ms/frame to 14 ms/frame. At the same time, the Mean Accuracy Precision (MAP) is reduced by 1.3%. Our model implements a lightweight network model and target recognition in the dense environment at a small cost. In our locating experiments, the maximum depth locating chili error is 1.84 mm, which meets the needs of a chili picking robot for chili recognition.