Purpose: Accurate monitoring of soil strength is a key technology applicable to various precision agricultural practices. Soil strength has been traditionally measured using a cone penetrometer, which is time-consuming and expensive, making it difficult to obtain the spatial data required for precision agriculture. To improve the current, inefficient method of measuring soil strength, our objective was to develop and evaluate an in-situ system that could measure horizontal soil strength in real-time, while moving across a soil bin. Methods: Multiple cone-shape penetrometers were horizontally assembled at the front of a vertical plow blade at intervals of 5 cm. Each penetrometer was directly connected to a load cell, which measured loads of 0-2.54 kN. In order to process the digital signals from every individual transducer concurrently, a microcontroller was embedded into the measurement system. Wireless data communication was used between a data storage device and this real-time horizontal soil strength (RHSS) measurement system travelling at 0.5 m/s through an indoor experimental soil bin. The horizontal soil strength index (HSSI) measured by the developed system was compared with the cone index (CI) measured by a traditional cone penetrometer. Results: The coefficient of determination between the CI and the HSSI at depths of 5 cm and 10 cm (r 2 = 0.67 and 0.88, respectively) were relatively less than those measured below 20 cm (r 2 ≥ 0.93). Additionally, the measured HSSIs were typically greater than the CIs for a given numbers of compactor operations. For an all-depth regression, the coefficient of determination was 0.94, with a RMSE of 0.23. Conclusions: A HSSI measurement system was evaluated in comparison with the conventional soil strength measurement system, CI. Further study is needed, in the form of field tests, on this real-time measurement and control system, which would be applied to precision agriculture.

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Purpose: A threshing machine for shatter-resistant sesame was designed and developed in this study. Methods: Two types of sesame (shatter-resistant and conventional) were tested using the developed sesame threshing system. Three types of serrated bars were designed and evaluated through performance tests, in terms of the ratio of unthreshed sesame. Results: In the case of conventional sesame, the ratio of unthreshed sesame did not show any difference with bar type or cylinder rotation speed. For shatter-resistant sesame, however, the ratio of unthreshed sesame decreased with increased cylinder rotating speed for all three types of bar. Conclusions: These results are useful for the construction and utilization of an efficient threshing harvester. The type-L bar showed the best result in the energy equation.

Purpose: Accurate monitoring of information from various agricultural vehicles is one of the most important factors for appropriate management strategy of field operations. While there has been a number of study and design on applications of sensors and actuators for data acquisition and control system in tractor, incompatibility between various customized hardware and software has become a major obstacle to the universal deployment in real field operation. International standard for implementation of electronic control unit (ECU) in agricultural vehicles has becoming a mandatory requirement for inter-operation compatibility in the international trade of agricultural vehicle industries. The ISO 11783 standard is basically based upon well known communication technology designated using the controller area network (CAN) bus. While CAN bus could provide 1.0 Mbps of communication speed, the standard only recommended 250 kbps. Methods: This study presents the implementation and evaluation of ISO 11783 for tractor electronic control units (TECU)with a higher transmission rate from multiple ECU than 250 kbps. Throughput and loss rate of the developed prototype were calculated across manipulated bus load for laboratory experimental tests, and the maximum requirement of transmission rate by ISO 11873 was satisfied with lower than 60% of bus load. Results: Field tests with a TECU implemented to process messages from global positioning system (GPS) receiver resulted that the root mean square error of position information was lower than 4 m with 0.5 m/s as a travelling speed. Conclusions: Results of this study represent the utilization of the international standard ISO 11783 to providepractical developments in terms with the inter-operability of TECU.

Purpose: Some of the most representative approaches are to apply next generation technologies to save energy consumption, fully automated control system to appropriately maintain environmental conditions, and autonomous assistance system to reduce labor load and ensure operator's safety. Nevertheless, improvement of upcoming method for soil cultured greenhouse has not been sufficiently achieved. Geometrical complexity of ground in protected crop cultivation might be one of the most dominant factors in design of autonomous vehicle. While there is a practical solution fairly enough to promise an accurate travelling, such as autonomous sprayer guided by rail or induction coil, for various reasons including the limitation of producer's budget, the previously developed sprayer has not been widely distributed to market. Methods: In this study, we developed an autonomous sprayer considering travelling performance on geometrical complexity of ground in soil cultured greenhouse. To maintain a stable travelling and to acquire a real time feedback, common wire with 80 mm thick and body frame and sprayer boom. To evaluate performance of the prototype, tracking performance, climbing performance and spraying boom's uniform leveling performance were individually evaluated by corresponding experimental tests. Results: The autonomous guidance system was proved to be sufficiently suitable for accurate linear traveling with RMS as lower than approximately 10 cm from designated path. Also the prototype could climb 10° of ground's slope angle with 40 kg of water weight. Uniform leveling of spraying boom was successfully performed within 0.5° of sprayer boom's slope. Conclusions: Considering more complex pathways and coarse ground conditions, evaluations and improvements of the prototype should be performed for promising reliability to commercialization.