The labor-intensive nature of harvest in the tree fruit industry makes it particularly sensitive to labor shortages. Technological innovation is thus critical in order to meet current demands without significantly increasing prices. This paper introduces a robotic system to help human workers during fruit harvest. A second-generation prototype is currently being built and simulation results dem...

Soil aggregate stability is an important indicator for controlling soil losses and can improve soil quality, particularly in an area such as the Loess Plateau. The objective of this study was to estimate the differences in soil aggregates across six different land-use systems (grassland, apple orchard, abandoned apple orchard, cropland maize, cropland wheat, and shrub-grassland). For this purpo...

The aim of this study was to establish the fractionation of copper and zinc in a small apple orchard using the revised (four-step) Bureau Communautaire de Référence (BCR) sequential extraction procedure and assess their potential mobility in soil. Soil samples were collected at the depth of 10 cm to 25 cm, sixteen from the orchard and five control samples from a meadow located some 200 m away f...

Our research concerned the development of an autonomous robotic navigation system for orchard harvesting with a dual master-slave mode, tractor transport robot being master followed by picking as slave. This addresses problem that in single agricultural combined equipment cannot stop repeatedly between rows apple trees and drive continuously when turning. According to distances obtained from gl...

Reflective bands of Landsat-5 Thematic Mapper satellite imagery were used to facilitate the estimation of basal crop evapotranspiration (ETcb), or potential crop water use, in San Joaquin Valley fields during 2008. A ground-based digital camera measured green fractional cover (Fc) of 49 commercial fields planted to 18 different crop types (row crops, grains, orchard, vineyard) of varying maturi...

The influence that different styles of olive-orchard management (conventional, integrated, and organic) exert on the predator Chrysoperla carnea has been studied to strengthen this insect's role in the integrated management against pests. For this, the adult chrysopid populations were determined by McPhail traps, and laboratory examinations were made of certain biological characteristics of the...

A crop load estimation is important for efficient apple orchard management. This information is important for planning and assigning appropriate labor pool and equipment for harvesting and transportation of fruits from orchard to packing houses. Current machine vision-based techniques for crop load estimation have achieved only limited success. Two primary factors affecting the accuracy of such...