Design and Experimental Evaluation of a Form Trimming Machine for Horticultural Plants

Abstract

Form trimming is an important practice in horticulture. Currently, handheld trimming tools are the most commonly used in China, which presents certain disadvantages including high human labor input, low productivity and inconsistent performance. In this work, a wheeled form trimming machine was designed for shrub plants with the aim of reducing labor input, increasing efficiency and improving trimming performance. The machine was mainly composed of three parts: a supporting frame, a rotary base and a knife system. The design and construction of the key components of the machine were introduced. The knife system was a combination of multiple cutter units with reciprocating motions. The number of units and their connecting angles could be adjusted to realize different trimming shapes. The knife system was carried by the rotary base and could realize 360° rotations to cut the plants into a desired form. Experiments were performed to determine the optimal working parameters (cutting frequency of the cutter unit and rotating speed of the rotary base). The similarity between the plant profile after trimming and the profile of the knife system and the consumed time in each operation were chosen as two evaluation indexes. Results showed that when the cutting frequency was 16.7 Hz and the rotating speed of the rotary base was 13.5 r/min, the trimming operation could be completed by two circles, and the time consumption was 8.89 s. Furthermore, to test the adaptability of the machine, five different shrub plants were chosen and trimmed by the machine, and results showed that the overall similarity was above 93%. Therefore, the form trimming machine developed could meet the requirements of shrub trimming in horticulture with desirable precision and adaptability.

Sensing and Automation Technologies for Ornamental Nursery Crop Production: Current Status and Future Prospects

“…Table 5 presents the summary of works related to other sensing and automation applications for nursery crop production. Li et al [ 86 ] developed a trimming robot for ornamental plants. The design includes a knife system and a rotary base, allowing the knife to rotate 360 degrees to cut the plants into the desired shape.…”

Predicting resprouting of Platanus × hispanica following branch pruning by means of machine learning

“…In horticulture and arboriculture, we currently see a strong trend toward the automation of pruning by machines or robots ( Sam et al., 2022 ). So far, these are comparatively standardized actions ( Li et al., 2021 ; Sam et al., 2022 ), but the more complex the tasks become in this regard, the more important is a plausible, robust, and prompt prediction of the growth reaction of a tree to pruning. At the same time, it can be assumed that in the future, trees worldwide will increasingly experience growth disturbances due to the consequences of climate change (drought, stronger and more frequent storms), which will be coupled with a loss of biomass and subsequent resprouting.…”

Predicting resprouting ofPlatanus×hispanicafollowing branch pruning by means of machine learning

“…In horticulture and arboriculture, we currently see a strong trend towards automation of pruning by machines or robots (Sam et al, 2022). So far, these are comparatively simple, standardized actions (M. Li et al, 2021;Sam et al, 2022), but the more complex the tasks become in this regard, the more important is a plausible, robust and prompt prediction of the growth reaction of a tree to pruning. At the same time, it can be assumed that in the future trees worldwide will increasingly experience growth disturbances due to the consequences of climate change (drought, stronger and more frequent storms), which will be coupled with a loss of biomass and subsequent resprouting.…”