Development of Performance Evaluation Systems for Vegetable Transplanter

Abstract.

Rural labor force has been gradually decreased due to decreasing of farm population and increasing of aging population. Therefore, the study of autonomous agricultural machinery is needed to overcome labor shortage in agriculture. These days most research on autonomous agricultural machinery has been carried out through field tests; however, field tests require lots of cost and time. Therefore, in this study, test method was developed for performance evaluation of hopper kinetic trajectory for riding type automatic transplanter. Hopper trajectory analysis system and circular soil box transplantation test system were developed for performance evaluation for transplanter hopper. It is confirmed that the difference of transplanter hopper trajectory and center line inclination between new prototype product (P) and advanced company product (A) using high-speed camera system. And planted/miss-planted test was carried out at 20-60 rpm hopper driving speed conditions using three kinds of raising seeding; cabbage and broccoli. The hill spacing according to hopper rotation speed was 190-560 mm. And average planted rate of each hopper driving speed were 94% for cabbage and 95% for broccoli. The results difference between product (P) and (A) is determined to be due to difference in hopper load and center line inclination of hopper trajectory. In the future, we plan to develop a soil resistance measuring system for hopper load measuring test during the transplanting work. In addition, we will carry out additional test to measure planted/miss-planted rate in various crops and soil conditions by using circular soil box transplantation test system.