Abstract—Modern agriculture processes use technology to solve the challenges posed by present ecological and environmental changes in agriculture system. Some of the familiar challenges include shortage of skilled formers, and labor work force in the agriculture fields. Fortunately, due to the advancements in electronics, artificial intelligence, and mechatronics, robots are the key in solving majority of these challenges. In recent developments, robots play important role in agriculture forming operations with fast, high accuracy, and continuously replacing manual works done by farmers. For instance, the spraying of pesticides to the plants of agriculture forms continuously may lead to serious health issues for humans such as respiratory problems, whereas the robots can spray efficiently and continuously despite human exhaustion. The modern agriculture form uses robotic arms in the forming operations, especially vertical forming, and horizontal forming methods, as the robot arms are flexible and high accuracy. In this paper, a new model called Three-Dimensional Unit Step Trajectory Plan is presented for modern agriculture harvesting processes. In addition, the paper presents a prototype structure with Six Degree of Freedom (6-DOF) robot arm, sensors, and a microcontroller. A kinematics analysis for the proposed robot arm is presented in the paper. The research methodology develops a trajectory motion plan of 6-DOF robotic arm for the purpose of detecting fruit’s ripeness in the plant with fast response time. The paper provides the results of proposed model with analysis.

Keywords—robotics, sensor, Six Degree of Freedom (6-DOF) arm, modern agriculture, fruit harvesting

Cite: Satyanarayana Degala, Abdullah Al Kalbani, Madan Kumar Sharma, Gopal Rathinam, Nadir Kamal Salih Idries, and Alaya Hamyar Al Azzani, "A Three-dimensional Unit Step Trajectory Plan Model for 6-DOF Robot Arm in Agriculture Harvesting Process," International Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Robotics Research, Vol. 15, No. 5, pp. 485-495, 2026. doi: 10.18178/ijmerr.15.5.485-495

Copyright © 2026 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).