Shumao Wang

Current Status and Technical Challenges of Asparagus Mechanical Harvesting

This article reviews the current status and technical challenges of mechanical harvesting of asparagus. Researchers have sought high efficiency machinery for harvesting asparagus over the past 100 years. However, none asparagus harvester has commercially available due to lower yield and poorer product quality comparing with hand harvesting. This paper first analyzes the critical biological and physical properties of asparagus relevant to mechanical harvest. Existing asparagus harvester can be categorized into three groups of mechanical aid, non-selective and selective mechanical harvesting. This paper then analyzes the operating principles of those three methods in terms of spear detection, cutting/snapping and collection/transportation. Economic and harvesting efficiency results are also discussed in this paper. Three main issues contributing to low efficiency are spear detecting accuracy, spear damage during harvesting and harvest effectiveness. Reported researches suggested that the integration of a mobile robotic system supported by a 3-D visual spear detector could offer a potential solution for automatic harvesting of asparagus if the control algorithm and/or a microcontroller could support real-time operation.

Development of an Assembly Consistency End-of-Line Inspection System for Corn Harvester

Nowadays, along with the application of intelligent equipment and new technology, automation degree of manufacturing becomes more and more advanced. While corn harvester, as one of the most important agricultural machineries, the assembly quality was still inspected by traditional method depending on workers’ experience in China. Transmission is the core part of corn harvester, which is also the vibration source of whole machine. Detecting and keeping transmission assembly consistency can reduce the vibration degree and increase the mean time to failure, and improve the performance of whole machine. In this paper, a transmission assembly consistency inspection system was designed and a method for judging the assembly consistency was proposed. The proposed approach included two parts, the vibration signals analysis, which was processed based on six bands method to calculate the energy of six bands; and the consistency comparison, which was used to judge the assembly consistency intuitively through the chart. In the last we chose the corn harvester pulverizer as an analysis object. According to result, the third and the fifth are incongruous.

Performance evaluation of two mechanical harvesters in removing cherry fruits for fresh market

To obtain the baseline information for supporting the development of new cherry harvesters for fresh market grade fruits, an investigation was conducted on assessing the performance and efficiency of two existing mechanical harvesters in removing cherry fruits from the trees. One harvester detaches fruits using an inertia force and the other using a vibration force. To gain a comprehensive understanding on the responses of cherry trees to those fruit detaching forces, a series of excited vibration tests were performed in this assessment study. To record the responding acceleration for performing the assessment, a group of single axial accelerometers were installed at different locations on the tree. From field experiment observations it was found that the responses of the limbs were different under different excitation mode. Obtained data further revealed that the vibratory shaker resulted in higher efficiency in fruits removal and less damage on fruit quality than that from the inertia harvester. Obtained results provided some critical information required for designing a more effective mechanical harvester with better produce quality.