Oil palm is an important industry that has contributed to income and support to the economic sector especially for Malaysia and Indonesia. However, most of the equipment in the oil palm industry is still operated manually. This work developed a system to separate bunches of oil palm fruit using color sensors according to maturity level. Fruit color plays a decisive point in determining fruit maturity. Here, a specific threshold point of red green blue (RGB) was obtained for the determination of the maturity level of oil palm fruit. Point values of < 120, 120 < x < 150 and > 150 represent the maturity levels of unripe, under ripe and ripe, respectively. This paper is the first to report the RGB points for use in the development of automated oil palm segregation system in the oil palm plantation industry. Thus, this paper will pave the way in producing an accurate and reliable oil palm separation system, which in turn has a positive effect in reducing human error. In the future, a set of sensors is proposed to detect a bunch of the oil palm fruits. This further can speed up the segregation process and more suitable for adaptation to the industry.

This paper presents an evaluation of performances rice cooking system with using Intelligent Controller that is Fuzzy Logic Controller (FLC) to meet the special requirements and some limitations of the rice cooking system. A new inference scheme is given to estimate the amount of rice and water to be used, and the temperature will be controlled according to the amount of rice and the time while cooking. The FLC system is designed by using two types of simulation software which are MATLAB Fuzzy Logic Toolbox and FuzzyTECH. The results obtained from the both simulation software are given in this paper. The differences the between both simulation also will be discussed. MATLAB Toolbox gives more specific results compared FuzzyTECH software. The both software meet the special requirements because is not much differ between each other.

A nanogenerator (NG) is an energy harvester device that converts mechanical energy into electrical energy on a small scale by relying on physical changes. Piezoelectric semiconductor materials play a key role in producing high output power in piezoelectric nanogenerator. Low cost, reliability, deformation, and electrical and thermal properties are the main criteria for an excellent device. Typically, there are several main types of piezoelectric materials, zinc oxide (ZnO) nanorods, barium titanate (BaTiO3) and lead zirconate titanate (PZT). Among those candidate, ZnO nanorods have shown high performance features due to their unique characteristics, such as having a wide-bandgap semiconductor energy of 3.3 eV and the ability to produce more ordered and uniform structures. In addition, ZnO nanorods have generated considerable output power, mainly due to their elastic nanostructure, mechanical stability and appropriate bandgap. Apart from that, doping the ZnO nanorods and adding doping impurities into the bulk ZnO nanorods are shown to have an influence on device performance. Based on findings, Ni-doped ZnO nanorods are found to have higher output power and surface area compared to other doped. This paper discusses several techniques for the synthesis growth of ZnO nanorods. Findings show that the hydrothermal method is the most commonly used technique due to its low cost and straightforward process. This paper reveals that the growth of ZnO nanorods using the hydrothermal method has achieved a high power density of 9 µWcm−2.

Remotely Operated Vehicles are underwater robots designed specifically for surveillance, monitoring and collecting data for underwater activities. In the underwater vehicle industries, the thruster is an important part in controlling the direction, depth and speed of the ROV. However, there are some ROVs that cannot be maintained at the specified depth for a long time because of disturbance. This paper proposes an auto depth control using a thruster system. A prototype of a thruster with an auto depth control is developed and attached to the previously fabricated UTeM ROV. This paper presents the operation of auto depth control as well as thrusters for submerging and emerging purposes and maintaining the specified depth. The thruster system utilizes a microcontroller as its brain, a piezoresistive strain gauge pressure sensor and a DC brushless motor to run the propeller. Performance analysis of the auto depth control system is conducted to identify the sensitivity of the pressure sensor, and the accuracy and stability of the system. The results show that the thruster system performs well in maintaining a specified depth as well as stabilizing itself when a disturbanceoccurs even with a simple proportional controller used to control the thruster, where the thruster is an important component of the ROV.

This paper investigates the study on the effect of shifting ‘zero’ membership function on Fuzzy Logic Controller (FLC) design of underwater Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) for depth control using Micro-box 2000/2000C interfacing based on thruster system. The issues occurred with a ROV design is where the thruster system can easily drain up current from the supply (e.g. battery source or power bank) and this will limit time to using the ROV. FLC do not have a rigid approach to tune it and may cause the process of tuning will be highly time costing. Therefore, a simple method by a study on the effect of shifting zero membership function will act as a one technique to tune the FLC for future references. The ROV Trainer will be developed to test the proposed control method using Micro-box 2000/2000C. The ROV Trainer consists of aluminum box, thrusters, drivers, interface connector, and etc and interfacing with Micro-box act as microcontroller. Fuzzy logic toolbox in MATLAB will be used to study the shifting zero membership function so that the effect of the adjustment can be investigated. The result of this project shows that, by shifting zero membership function of the fuzzy logic controller, the performance of the fuzzy logic controller is normally improved.