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Advances In Automating Individual Plant Care Of Vegetable Crops
1
M. Pérez Ruiz,
2
D. C. Slaughter
1. Universidad de Sevilla
2. University of California, Davis
Automation of individual crop plant care in commercial vegetable crop fields has increased practical feasibility and improved efficiency and economic benefit if a systems approach is taken in the engineering design to mechanization that incorporates precision planting techniques. In addition to the optimization in the biological productivity of crop plants when the spatial distribution of crop plants allows their uniform access to nutrients, water and light in an optimum utilization of field resources, the performance and efficiency benefits extend to the mechanization aspects of precision farming when a precise planting pattern can be implemented that facilitates automated plant localization as well as facilitating the interface of farming mechatronic systems with the crop plants and the surrounding soil.
This work describes the recent effort conducted at UC Davis to couple multi-row synchronized precision planting in a grid planting pattern with synchronized precision intra-row mechanical weed removal in a systems approach to automated weed control in vegetable crop production in California. Selecting tomato as the target vegetable crop, a three-row synchronized intra-row weed control system was developed that utilized a co-robot design approach to automation of intra-row hoeing mechanism. In this design, a co-robot actuator automatically positioned a pair of miniature hoes into the intra-row zone between crop plants. Co-robot knife actuation was controlled using a priori knowledge of the crop planting pattern and real-time odometry data as the control input for knife positioning. Low-frequency drift in the odometry control points relative to the actual plant locations was corrected occasionally as needed in real-time by a human supervisor monitoring system performance.
To facilitate the economic feasibility of a co-robot design approach to mechatronic weed control, the human resources need to be minimized while the robotic aspects need to be maximized. This optimization was achieved by simultaneously developing a precision three-row synchronized transplanting system, where the three transplanting modules were mechanically synchronized to allow precise placement of the tomato seedlings in a three-row grid planting pattern. Typically, transplanting modules used in vegetable crops in California act asynchronously, resulting in a random offset of the plant locations between rows in a plant care set. This creates a chaotic management environment for the human supervisor monitoring co-robot weed control actuation decisions, forcing a decline in economic productivity either by increasing the human to robot resource ratio or by decreasing the travel speed of the vehicle. In contrast, the systems approach utilizing a synchronous design for both planting and weed control actions demonstrated in this work, allows one human supervisor to monitor the actions of three co-robotic weed control modules, increasing the economic productivity.
The performance of the three-row synchronous transplanting system was evaluated in a 0.4 hectare field trial conducted on a commercial organic processing tomato farm in California. Results show that a precision synchronized transplanter was able to achieve both the desired plant-to-plant spacing along each of the three rows in a plant care set, as well as the desired three-row grid planting pattern between the three rows simultaneously planted in each set. An analysis comparing the yield between the conventionally hand hoed rows to those rows automatically weeded using the co-robotic system show no loss in the tomato crop productivity at harvest associated with the co-robot actuator automatically positioning a pair of miniature hoes into the intra-row zone between crop plants. These results demonstrate the feasibility of using a single human supervisor to monitor a set of three co-robotic weed control modules when a systems approach was utilized to allow synchronous actuation of the miniature hoes in a tomato field that was also synchronously planted in a precise grid-like plant pattern.
Keyword
: Automation, Precision Planting, Mechatronic Weed Control, Co-robotic Agriculture
M. Pérez ruiz
D. C. Slaughter
Engineering Technologies and Advances
Oral
2014
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