Abstract: To clean tobacco leaves adhering to the emptied tobacco baskets in vacuum conditioning station in primary processing line, a robot was designed, it was composed of a six-axis manipulator, a vision inspection system and a cleaning device. To ensure the smooth movement of the manipulator and avoid the vibration and impact of the cleaning robot, the S-shaped trajectory is modified by sine function. The vision inspection system is used to control the cleaning track of the manipulator following the binarization of the images of the tobacco leaves in the tobacco basket, zoned BLOB(binary large object)analysis and data integration and formatting. The basket cleaning is completed by brushing and compressed air blowing, and the size and shape of the brush are optimized through orthogonal test. The robot was tested on the tobacco leaves for cigarette brand"Golden Leaf(Hard Hongqiqu)"in Anyang Cigarette Factory. The results showed that compared with manual cleaning, the tobacco loss reduced by about 20 000 kg/year. The saving in total raw materials and labor cost reached about 1 154 thousand RMB yuan/year. This technology provides a support for decreasing the tobacco loss in primary processing line.