Tsuguo Okamoto

Measurement of Sugarcane Surface Roughness Using Laser

In Japan, mechanical sugarcane harvesting has been introduced in many regions. It improves the efficiency of sugarcane harvesting, but also brings the cane tops into sugar factories, which decreases the yield and causes economic losses. This study investigated a system that can distinguish cane tops from the mechanically harvested raw sugarcane materials. We used a green He-Ne laser (wavelength 543.5 nm, output 4 mW) to scan sugarcane and measured the back-reflected light intensity by a light sensor (avalanche photodiode module). Since the surface roughness is different between cane top and cane stalk, analyzing the different patterns of the distribution of the back-reflected light intensity enables the cane top and stalk to be distinguished. In the experiment, 22 cane tops and 32 cane stalks were used as samples. Using kurtosis as a parameter to analyze the patterns, the percentage of correctly identifying cane tops was 90.9, and that of cane stalks was 71.9, and the percentage of correct answers of all samples was 79.6.

Robotic Separation of Stage IV Micropropagated Sugarcane Shoots

A robot system that continuously divides a clump of micropropagated sugarcane seedlings into individual shoots was developed and tested. Micropropagated sugarcane seedlings are generally called sugarcane mericlone, and a technique to produce these seedlings in large quantities by tissue culture has been developed recently. The mericlone sugarcanes grow thickly and their roots become entangled with each other, thus they form a root ball and it is difficult to separate these seedlings. To solve these problems, two new types of end-effectors were developed. The first one was a continuous shoots picking mechanism (CSPM), which was designed to bring the thickly grown shoots into a line and handle them without damage. The second one was a single shoot separator (SSS), which was designed to pull off individual sugarcane shoots from the clump one by one.