Image Processing
S. Abdanan Mehdizadeh
Abstract
IntroductionAdopting new technologies for crop growth has the characteristics of improving disaster resistance and stress tolerance, ensuring stable yields, and improving product quality. Currently, the cultivation of seed trays relies on huge labor power, and further mechanization is needed to increase ...
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IntroductionAdopting new technologies for crop growth has the characteristics of improving disaster resistance and stress tolerance, ensuring stable yields, and improving product quality. Currently, the cultivation of seed trays relies on huge labor power, and further mechanization is needed to increase production. However, there are some problems in this operation, such as the difficulty of improving the speed of a single machine, seedling deficiency detection, automatic planting, and controlling the quality, which need to be solved urgently. To solve these problems, there are already some meaningful attempts. Si et al. (2012) applied a photoelectric sensor to a vegetable transplanter, which can measure the distance between seedlings and the movement speed of seedlings in a seedling guide tube, to prevent omission transplantation. Yang et al. (2018) designed a seedling separation device with reciprocating movement of the seedling cup for rice transplanting. Tests show that the structure of the mechanical parts of the seedling separation device meets the requirements of seed movement. The optimization of the control system can improve the positioning accuracy according to requirements and achieve the purpose of automatic seedling division. Chen et al. (2020) designed and tested of soft-pot-tray automatic embedding system for a light-economical pot seedling nursery machine. The experimental results showed that the embedded-hard-tray automatic lowering mechanism was reliable and stable as the tray placement success rate was greater than 99%. The successful tray embedding rate was 100% and the seed exposure rate was less than 1% with a linear velocity of the conveyor belt of 0.92 m s-1. The experiment findings agreed well with the analytical results.Despite the sharp decline in Iran's water resources and growing population, the need to produce food and agricultural products is greater than ever. In the past, most seeds were planted directly into the soil, and many water resources, especially groundwater, were used for direct seed sowing and plant germination. One way to reduce the consumption of water, fertilizers, and pesticides is to plant seedlings instead of direct seed sowing. Therefore, the purpose of this study was dynamic modeling and fabrication of seed planting systems in seedling trays.Material and MethodsIn this experiment, Flores sugar beet seeds (Maribo company, Denmark) were used. The seedling trays had dimensions of 29.5*60 cm with openings and holes of 5.5 and 4 cm, respectively. To plant seeds in seedling trays, first, a planter arm was modeled and its position was obtained at any time. Then, based on dynamic modeling, the arm was constructed and a capacitive proximity sensor (CR30-15AC, China) and IR infrared proximity sensor (E18-D80NK, China) were used to find the location of seedling trays on the input conveyor and position of discharging arm, respectively. To achieve a stable and effective control system, a micro-controller-based circuit was developed to signal the planting system. The seed planting operation was performed in the seedling tray according to the coordinates which were provided through the image processing method. The planting system was evaluated at two levels of forward speed (5 and 10 cm s-1). Moreover, a smartphone program was implemented to monitor the operation of the planting system.Results and DiscussionThe planting system was assessed for sugar beet seeds using two levels of forward speed (5 and 10 cm s-1). The nominal capacity of this planter ranged from 3579 to 4613 cells per hour, with a miss and multiple implantation indices of 0.03% and 8.17%, respectively, in 3000 cells. Due to its planting accuracy, speed, and low energy consumption (25.56 watt-hours), this system has the potential to replace manual seeding in seedling trays.ConclusionIn the present study, a seed-sowing system for planting seedling trays was designed, constructed, and evaluated based on dynamic modeling. In the developed system, unlike previous research, planting location detection was conducted through image processing. Additionally, a smartphone program was established to monitor the operation of the planting system without interfering with its performance. This study demonstrates that image processing can successfully detect planting locations and can effectively improve efficiency over time for major producers.
Design and Construction
J. Ghezavati; D. Mohammad Zamani; M. Abbasgholipour; B. Mohammadi Alasti; A. Ranji
Abstract
Introduction: From an economic viewpoint, tomato is considered as the second most valuable crop after potato. It is also preceded by the potato in terms of per capita consumption in the world. In 2008, the cultivation area used for the tomato as equal to 163,539 hectares in Iran and the production of ...
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Introduction: From an economic viewpoint, tomato is considered as the second most valuable crop after potato. It is also preceded by the potato in terms of per capita consumption in the world. In 2008, the cultivation area used for the tomato as equal to 163,539 hectares in Iran and the production of it was equal to 5,887,715 tons with an average production of 117,887 tons in 4352 hectares in the provinces, respectively. Having high production volume and quality, costly hybrid seeds are currently used for the major planting areas of vegetable in Iran. Most of the used transplanted seedlings are 83%. Since the seeds are expensive, the percentage of seedlings and healthy and disease-free seeds should be used for maximized germination and be transferred to the fields of open space. Preparing seedlings in transplanting trays is a technology to respond to this need. Trays are covered with a layer of Peat and Miculite fertilizers. Then, one seed is manually placed in each cell after gauging and preparing a suitable field. However, manually placing seeds is time-consuming and requires hard labor. Sixteen working labors per hour are required for 15 × 7 cell in order to have 10200 seedlings grown in 100 trays. Due to lack of adequate labor, production capacity of greenhouses is reduced, especially in the farming season when finding labor for planting vegetable sprouts is laborious. Therefore, mechanizing tray seeding operations is essential to increase the capacity of the growing industry of greenhouses in Iran.Materials and Methods: Initially, the tomato seeds were examined in the laboratory. The most important parameters of the study included size, shape, weight, the speed of getting out of the tank and the minimum carrying speed. Then, a vacuum-based single seed picking unit was prepared to investigate the factors influencing the design, so that a single tomato seed can be harvested from the masses. The most important factors considered in the design and construction included: cost, ease of performance, portability, use of local equipment, the planter’s capacity as well as the style of picking single seeds (In Fig.1, the original scheme of the device is presented). The planter consists of several parts operating harmoniously to yield the desired results. These parts include a chassis and conveyor belt mechanism, primary and secondary fertilizer tanks, squashing unit, seed metering device and vibrating reservoir of the seed (The main text of modeling the device with SolidWorks software is shown in Fig.2). This device is designed in such a way that the position of the nozzle, the suction pressure, the height of removing seeds and the vibration frequency of the seeding tray are adjustable. Evaluation of the device was carried out by single seeding of tomato seeds in trays with 105 cells (7 × 15). Suction pressure and nozzle size were calculated for tomato seeds. Scaling distances were considered equal, based on the 30.5-mm intervals of the cells. Single seed picking efficiency of seeds was calculated by the system, as the single percentage of seeding and the total percentage of seeded cells. Seed consumption efficiency is the ratio of the total seeded cells to the total number of existing seeds in the cells. Seeding efficiency also refers to single, dual, and multiple harvested seeds. Furthermore, the device capacity is defined as the number of seeded tray cells per hour. In order to design and build a precise robot planter, an experiment including the designed planter and planting speed of workers in 10 repetitions was designed and implemented to estimate the seeding time and compare with automated and manual planting methods. Seedling trays with four replications were cultivated by the designed robot and the number of cultivated seeds per tray at each stage were correctly counted. After that, the spent planting time by a worker was determined with four replications.Results and Discussion: The planting rate of tomato seeds is different when comparing mechanized and manual methods. As it is known, the time required for cultivation in the mechanized method is at least one-tenth of the time required for cultivation in the conventional and manual method, which causes the planting rate to increase, and this robot is one of the components of cultivation in the mechanized method in cultivation and production of tomatoes. By assessing planting time using the mechanized method it was revealed that an average of 26.3 seconds is needed to fill a 7 × 15 centimeter tray of tomato seeds with 105 cells. The same planting procedure in the manual method takes an average of 357 seconds which is indicative of the high rate of the designed device. The planter capacity experimented using a seedling tray with the size of 15×7 cells, was calculated to be 17750 cells per hour showing that the suction pressure increases by a reduction in seed size. Thus, while working with small-sized seeds, fluctuations of the suction pressure must be carefully considered to be minimized and the seed being dual was only affected by the opening diameter. Therefore, the opening diameter should become the same in size in order to minimize the dual seed instances. In case of the tomato, the opening diameter had a great influence on the seeds being bulky.Conclusions: Manual planting takes a considerable time in comparison with the mechanized planting. Furthermore, using the designed device in addition to speeding up the planting process, caused regular and accurate cultivation of tomato seeds in order to produce seedlings. The results indicate that utilizing the device over time is highly economical for the major producers of tomatoes, and it is recommended to be used in agro-industry companies, and in the mechanized method of planting in large scales.
