Abstract:
Organic farming, in a modern context of precision agriculture, requires new tools in order to
improve the quality and efficiency of field operations, while reducing their costs. This theoretical
study will present and analyse new approaches to perform mechanical weeding inside the row in
horticulture fields. The idea is to weed the row by skipping the crop by means of a rotating
system instead of a traditional crosswise one. In this way the machine follows the direction of the
working progression (although this is not possible for all the proposed models) thus avoiding the
displacement of machine inertial mass orthogonally to the working trajectory, which tends to
unbalance the machine, and increase fuel as well as components' consumption. The different
configurations experimented by means of simulation models have shown different solutions: the
horizontal axis rotating plant-skipping system (RPSS-HA) allows to work only within the row,
while all the other models (with vertical rotating axis RPSS (RPSS-VA), the forward-backward
tilting plant-skipping system on a vertical axis (FBTS), with constant or variable rotation speed,
respectively FBTS-CR, and FBTS-VR) present also a worked area outside the row. This study
highlights also the need of new approaches in the design of working tools, in order to substitute,
for example, the traditional "heavy" working tools (blades, teeth, hoes, etc.) with lighter ones. |
