Problems In Mechanical Harvesting

1340 Words6 Pages
Harvesting Harvesting is the process of collecting the mature rice crop from the field. It starts with cutting the crop and ends with cleaning the paddy and preparing it to be dried. Harvesting at the right time and in the right way maximizes grain yield and minimizes grain losses and quality deterioration. Conventional harvesting method is highly labour intensive and inefficient in terms of both economy and time. Machine harvesting systems are a partial solution to overcome these issues by removing fruits from the trees efficiently thus to reduce the harvesting cost to about 35-45% of total production cost. Two streams of harvesting systems have been researched and attempted through years since early 60’s. They are mechanical harvester…show more content…
A post selection process can be appended to maintain the aesthetic appearance and value of product for the consumer. However, the mechanical system operates blind when it come to removing quality ripe fruit In the early 1960s, the concept of an automatic harvester was proposed and investigated by Schertz and Brown using automatic robotic picking device. They proposed a system which uses a robotic arm to position a manipulator within the picking range of target fruit before detaching the fruit from the tree. The guidance for the manipulator is achieved by a machine vision system to detect the fruit. However the nature of the horticultural environment makes the fruit detection a challenging task. It is well known that the robust solutions are still largely underdeveloped. The issues are multifactor of such as the unstructured environment, limitations of the sensors, and a robust methodology. Hence this review paper is focused toward the novel sensor designs and image processing methods which aim to present the reader with an…show more content…
The automatic individual harvester was considered as an alternative method to the mechanical harvester by Schertz and Brown. The two detachment devices, a vacuum twist device and a rotating cutoff device, were used in the research. The photometric comparisons showed the potential use of the light reflectance for the fruit detection. The concepts were further developed by Parrish and Goskel from University of Virgia in 1976. Much concrete works began at around 1983 at Kyoto University at Japan, and at University of Florida. Then CEMAGREF Montpellier France[ extended it on the subsequent projects.The state of arts of individual robotic harvesting systems has been reviewed in this section. The study focused on the sensors and the vision system in mechanical manipulator. Even though the review is majorly focused on the citrus fruit harvester, some other significant robotic harvesting systems for different kinds of fruits harvesting are selected and reviewed as a complementary
Open Document