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Harvesting fully ripe tomatoes with mobile robots presents significant challenges in real-world scenarios. These challenges arise from factors such as occlusion caused by leaves and branches, as well as the color similarity between tomatoes and the surrounding foliage during the fruit development stage. The natural environment further compounds these issues with varying light conditions, viewing angles, occlusion factors, and different maturity levels. To overcome these obstacles, this research introduces a novel framework that leverages a convolutional transformer architecture to autonomously recognize and grade tomatoes, irrespective of their occlusion level, lighting conditions, and ripeness. The proposed model is trained and tested using carefully annotated images curated specifically for this purpose. The dataset is prepared under various lighting conditions, viewing perspectives, and employs different mobile camera sensors, distinguishing it from existing datasets such as Laboro Tomato and Rob2Pheno Annotated Tomato. The effectiveness of the proposed framework in handling cluttered and occluded tomato instances was evaluated using two additional public datasets, Laboro Tomato and Rob2Pheno Annotated Tomato, as benchmarks. The evaluation results across these three datasets demonstrate the exceptional performance of our proposed framework, surpassing the state-of-the-art by 58.14%, 65.42%, and 66.39% in terms of mean average precision scores for KUTomaData, Laboro Tomato, and Rob2Pheno Annotated Tomato, respectively. The results underscore the superiority of the proposed model in accurately detecting …