Safer Tractor Operations for Home and Acreage Owners

Home-owners and poverty

A System for Semi-Autonomous Tractor Operations

Tractors are the workhorses of the modern farm. By automating these machines, we can increase the productivity, improve safety, and reduce costs for many agricultural operations. Many researchers have tested computer-controlled machines for farming, but few have investigated the larger issues such as how humans can supervise machines and work amongst them. In this paper, we present a system for...

Diesel Fuel Consumption during Tractor Operations

Introduction Direct energy expenses (diesel, gasoline, propane, electricity) total more than $1 billion annually for Iowa’s farmers. Day-to-day farm management techniques such as adjusting tractor gear and throttle settings, making use of front-wheel-drive, and other strategies can reduce diesel fuel consumption for row crop production and general tractor operations. This study is being conduct...

Accounting for lost acreage.

Privately owned forests, wetlands, and crop-lands in the United States are disappearing at alarming rates due to development and erosion , according to a report released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) on 7 December 1999. The report, which summarizes the USDA's 1997 National Resources Inventory (NRI), reveals that development has doubled during the last decade to-more than three mi...

A Multimodal Distributed Intelligent Environment for a Safer Home

This paper presents an ambient intelligence system aimed at increasing the security of elderly people in their living environment. The proposed system processes both video and audio signals to detect dangerous events and trigger automatic warnings. The system is implemented through a software middleware for multimedia streaming and processing in which the information is processed in several, di...