A Lightweight and Rapid Dragon Fruit Detection Method for Harvesting Robots

Dragon fruit detection in natural environments remains challenged by limited accuracy and deployment difficulties, primarily due to variable lighting and occlusions from branches. To enhance detection accuracy and satisfy the deployment constraints of edge devices, we propose YOLOv10n-CGD, a lightweight and efficient dragon fruit detection method designed for robotic harvesting applications. The method builds upon YOLOv10 and integrates Gated Convolution (gConv) into the C2f module, forming a novel C2f-gConv structure that effectively reduces model parameters and computational complexity. In addition, a Global Attention Mechanism (GAM) is inserted between the backbone and the feature fusion layers to enrich semantic representations and improve the detection of occluded fruits. Furthermore, the neck network integrates a Dynamic Sample (DySample) operator to enhance the spatial restoration of high-level semantic features. The experimental results demonstrate that YOLOv10n-CGD significantly improves performance while reducing model size from 5.8 MB to 4.5 MB—a 22.4% decrease. The mAP improves from 95.1% to 98.1%, with precision and recall reaching 97.1% and 95.7%, respectively. The observed improvements are statistically significant ( p < 0.05). Moreover, detection speeds of 44.9 FPS and 17.2 FPS are achieved on Jetson AGX Orin and Jetson Nano, respectively, demonstrating strong real-time capabilities and suitability for deployment. In summary, YOLOv10n-CGD enables high-precision, real-time dragon fruit detection while preserving model compactness, offering robust technical support for future robotic harvesting systems and smart agricultural terminals.