Click on “Download PDF” for the PDF version or on the title for the HTML version.

If you are not an ASABE member or if your employer has not arranged for access to the full-text, Click here for options.

Abstract. The way of obtaining natural rubber is mainly manual tapping so far. But it is difficult to ensure the bark consumption and cutting depth when manually tapping the rubber, which may easily cause damage to the tree and reduce production. The rubber forest is a complex environment and it is difficult to achieve automatic tapping. More realistic way is manual tapping with a portable tapping machine. For this phenomenon, a portable electric tapping machine was designed in this paper. The method of image processing was used to verify the bark consumption of the electric tapping machine. The experimental results show that the difference between the bark consumption of each point of each cut and each group is less than 0.2 mm, and this electric tapping machine can effectively ensure bark consumption uniform.