• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.27 no.5
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• pp.409-416
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• 2002

This study was conducted to develop a vehicle, leading or following a worker at a certain distance to assist laborious transporting works in greenhouses. A prototype vehicle, which consisted of the rear driving, the front steering and the console units, was designed and tested in the ideal indoor conditions. Results of this study were summarized as following: 1. The driving unit was designed to travel at the speed ranges of 0.3∼0.8 m/sec depending on the operating modes with a maximum payload of 100 kg. 2. The console unit consisted of a main-board including a 80C196KC microprocessor and peripheral devices, a power-board and safety interlock. Worker-leading, and following modes were available in automatic and manual modes. 3. Steering was achieved by turning the steering motor against the sensed direction. Proper steering angles for correcting travel direction were determined as 5 and 9 degrees when sensing cultivation beds and plants, respectively.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Agricultural Machinery Conference
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• 1996.06c
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• pp.1063-1072
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• 1996

Fruit harvesting robots should have more diversity and flexibility in the working conditions and environments than industrial robots. This paper presents an efficient optimization algorithm for redundant manipulators to avoid obstacles using dynamic performance criteria, while the optimization schemes of the previous studies used the performance criteria using kinematic approach. Feasibility and effectiveness of this algorithm were tested through simulations on a 3-degrees-of-freedom manipulator made for this study. Only the position of the end-effector was controlled , which requires only three degrees of freedom. Remaining joints, except for the wrist roll joint, which does not contribute to the end-effector linear velocity, provide two degrees of redundancy. The algorithm was effective to avoid obstacles in the workspace even through the collision occurred in extended workspace, and it was found be to a useful design tool which gives more flexibility to design conditions nd to find the mechanical constraints for fruit harvesting robots.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.31 no.1 s.114
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• pp.52-58
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• 2006

Various robots were developed for harvesting fruits and vegetables. However, each robot was designed for a specific task such as harvesting apples or vegetables. This has been a big hurdle in application of robots to agriculture. A new type of hybrid manipulator with both parallel and serial joints was developed and designed to apply to various kinds of field operations. The hybrid manipulator had 2 extra degree of freedom in serial joints which made it flexible in switching one to the other type of hybrid manipulator, for example, PUMA to SCARA. And it was designed to harvest heavy fruits such as musky melons or water melons even behind leaves or branches of tree. This hybrid manipulator showed less than $\pm1mm$ position error. It was concluded that the hybrid manipulator was an effective and feasible tool to perform various works and to increase working performance.

• Korean Journal of Agricultural Science
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• v.47 no.2
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• pp.205-217
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• 2020

In this study, a deep learning-based tillage boundary detection method for autonomous tillage by a tractor was developed, which consisted of image cropping, object classification, area segmentation, and boundary detection methods. Full HD (1920 × 1080) images were obtained using a RGB camera installed on the hood of a tractor and were cropped to 112 × 112 size images to generate a dataset for training the classification model. The classification model was constructed based on convolutional neural networks, and the path boundary was detected using a probability map, which was generated by the integration of softmax outputs. The results show that the F1-score of the classification was approximately 0.91, and it had a similar performance as the deep learning-based classification task in the agriculture field. The path boundary was determined with edge detection and the Hough transform, and it was compared to the actual path boundary. The average lateral error was approximately 11.4 cm, and the average angle error was approximately 8.9°. The proposed technique can perform as well as other approaches; however, it only needs low cost memory to execute the process unlike other deep learning-based approaches. It is possible that an autonomous farm robot can be easily developed with this proposed technique using a simple hardware configuration.

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.87-91
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• 2019

In this paper, we have development of horizontal attitude monitoring system for agricultural robots. A two-axis gyro sensor and a two-axis accelerometer sensor are used to measure the horizontal attitude angle. The roll angle and pitch angle were measured through the fusion of the gyro sensor signal and the acceleration sensor signal for the horizontal attitude monitoring of the robot. This attitude monitoring system includes GPS and Bluetooth communication module for remote monitoring. The roll angle and pitch angle can be measured by the error of less than 1 degree and the linearity and the reproducibility of the output signal are excellent.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.281-286
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• 2004

The end-effector is the one of the important factors on development of the cucumber robot to harvester a cucumber. Three end-effectors were designed the single blade end-effector with one blade, the double blade end-effector with two blades and the triple blade end-effector with three blades. Performance tests of the end-effector, the fully integrated system, were conducted to determine the cutting rate by using two different kinds of cucumber. The success rates of cucumber cutting ratio of single end-effector, double end-effector and triple end-effector in laboratory. were 61.7%, 95%, 86.7%, respectively. The cutting rate of single blade or double blade was a little difference with respect to the different diameters of cucumber stem. However, the success cutting rate of the end-effector with triple blade was 61.7% under 29mm diameter of a grabbing stem section. The triple end-effector was not suitable for harvesting a cucumber, but was considered to be suitable for harvesting a grape, an apple and a tomato. The success rate of cucumber cutting ratio of triple end-effectors in greenhouse was 84%. The failure cutting rate was 16% which are due to abnormal shape of cucumber fruit.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.33 no.6
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• pp.453-461
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• 2008

This study was conducted to develop a root-removed splice grafting system for cucurbitaceous vegetables, mainly watermelon and cucumber seedlings, for the seedlings factories where currently most of seedlings grafting works are carried out by manual works. The major results of the study are as follows. The dimensions of rootstocks and scions, except cotyledon width, of root- removed splice grafting of watermelon and cucumber were shown to be varied within the 2.5-fold range. The growth status of seedlings were not consistent in terms of cotyledon sprouting direction and angle which were considered as one of the important factors for in root-removed splice grafting. The grafting work of root-removed splice for grafted watermelon and cucumber could be divided by four sub-operations: seedling supplying, cutting, clipping and potting, while a part or all root of the rootstock was removed in the seedlings supplying operation. The cutting angles of the rootstock and scion were $34-45^{\circ}$ and $20-45^{\circ}$, respectively, while the stem length of the scion varied from 6 mm to 12 mm. The splices of rootstock and scion were heaped up in parallel and then fixed by a clip. It indicated that the ideal grafting system, adopting conventional grafting processes of seedlings specifications as well as conventionally manual root-removed splice grafting method, performed very well for seedlings gripping and transporting, supplying clip, clipping and discharging grafted seedlings while workers supplied seedlings to the semi-automatical system.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.23 no.5
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• pp.491-498
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• 1998

Transplanting process during the tissue culture of potato seedlings is costly, since the cost of highly skilled labor working in the sanitary environment takes up about 60-70% of the production cost. The objective of this study was to develop a soft gripper of a transplanting robot system for the labor-saving tissue culture. The prototype of the soft gripper was consisted of power-transmitting part finger and plant contacts. The power transmitting part transformed the rotating motion of a step motor to the reciprocating motion of the finger. Plant stems used in the test were potato seedlings cultured for six weeks. The dimensional characteristics of cultured seedlings, the compressive strengths of the stems, the extractive force from the culture medium and the gripping force of the finger were measured. A proper gripping force was found to be 0.343N at the extractive force of 0.41N when the plant contacts were made of silicon. Sixteen plants out of 70 trials were tangled with others, resulting in the success rate of 77.1%.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.26 no.7
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• pp.73-80
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• 2009

This paper describes a path planning algorithm, which is the minimal turning path based on the shape and size of the cell to clean up the whole area with two cleaning robots. Our method divides the whole cleaning area with each cell by cellular decomposition, and then provides some path plans among of the robots to reduce the rate of energy consumption and cleaning time of it. In addition we suggest how to plan between the robots especially when they are cleaning in the same cell. Finally simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm in an unknown area with multiple robots. And then we compare the performance index of two algorithms such as total of turn, total of time.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.23 no.6
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• pp.629-634
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• 1998

Factory-style plant production system aims to produce the standardized horticultural products with high quality and cleanness. In Korea, researches for year-round leaf vegetables production system are in progress and the most of them are focused on environment control. Automating technologies for harvesting, transporting and grading need to be developed. A lettuce harvesting system applicable to the plant factory was studied. It was composed of an articulated robot with a cutter and a gripper, lettuce feeding conveyor and air blower. Success rate of the developed system was 94.7 %. The system carried out harvesting a lettuce smoothly and the harvesting time was about 6 seconds per lettuce. The results showed a feasibility of robotic lettuce harvesting.