Development and evaluation of a low-cost precision seeding control system for a corn drill

Xiang Yin,Tengxiang Yang,Chengqian Jin,Noboru Noguchi

doi:10.25165/j.ijabe.20181105.3369

Abstract

Precision seeding requires that the corn drill drop seeds into the soil by a specific in-row spacing while its travelling speed fluctuates due to unevenness of the field ground. This paper presents a low-cost precision seeding control system for a conventional corn drill with mechanical metering devices of finger-pickup type. A median filtering method was implemented in the control system to process measurements from a rotary encoder in order to acquire stable values of the corn drill travelling speed. The metering unit was driven by an electric motor controlled by the metering ECU according to the actual travelling speed and the desired in-row spacing in real-time. A user interface was programmed to communicate with ECUs for configuring parameters and displaying operating information during working. The newly-developed precision seeding control system was first calibrated in terms of speed measurement and control for two ECUs. Experiments were conducted on a seeding test platform in the laboratory for evaluating its accuracy in dropping seeds by giving different in-row spacing under different travelling speeds of the conveyor sticky belt. Results showed that the average spacing error was less than 2 cm and the maximum RMS error was 0.78 cm for all spacing values including 25 cm, 30 cm and 35 cm under the travelling speed of 1.0-8.0 km/h. These indicated that the low-cost precision seeding control system worked in a both accurate and stable way. Keywords: precision seeding, corn drill, control system, travelling speed, in-row spacing DOI: 10.25165/j.ijabe.20181105.3369 Citation: Yin X, Noguchi N, Yang T X, Jin C Q. Development and evaluation of a low-cost precision seeding control system for a corn drill. Int J Agric & Biol Eng, 2018; 11(5): 95–99.

Highlights

With the development of precision farming in smart agriculture, variable rate application (VRA) has been becoming increasingly popular, which is intended to make full use of investment of seeds, fertilizers and pesticides according to site-specific management principles within one field
Basic parameters including N and M, were set to 600 and 12, respectively, by using the RS232 touch screen according to the encoder and the metering unit used in this research. ∆T was fixed for each electronic control unit (ECU) and needed to be calibrated by experiments
This research explored the possibility of developing a low-cost precision seeding control system that could continuously change the rotating speed of the metering unit by using an electric motor according to the travelling speed

Summary

Introduction

With the development of precision farming in smart agriculture, variable rate application (VRA) has been becoming increasingly popular, which is intended to make full use of investment of seeds, fertilizers and pesticides according to site-specific management principles within one field. LiDAR sensors, laser range finders or ultrasonic sensors were utilized to detect the canopy volume and a controller determined a flow rate for adjustment of variable-rate valves[7,8,9,10,11,12]. This spraying method reduced the amount of agrochemicals under the background of precision horticulture, compared with conventional pesticide application methods. A DC electric variable-rate controller was presented to change the metering shaft speed in real-time by comparing the drill position and moving velocity with reference data in the prescription map[14]. Methods for VRA in those studies could be generally based on maps or sensors

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Conclusion