Design and Experimental Research on Seedling Pick-Up Mechanism of Planetary Gear Train with Combined Non-circular Gear Transmission

Currently, transplanting mechanisms for dryland plug seedlings in China are mainly semiautomatic and have low efficiency. The rotary seedling pick-up mechanism with a planetary gear train for non-uniform intermittent transmission, and a concave and convex locking arc device, has a large rigid impact. To solve these problems, according to the design requirements for a dryland plug seedling transplanting mechanism, a rotary seedling pick-up mechanism of a planetary gear train with combined non-circular gear transmission of incomplete eccentric circular and noncircular gears was proposed. This has the characteristics of two-times greater fluctuation of the transmission ratio in a cycle, and can achieve a non-uniform continuous drive. Through analysis of the working principle of the seedling pick-up mechanism, its kinematics model was established. The human–computer interaction optimization method and self-developed computer-aided analysis and optimization software were used to obtain a set of parameters that satisfy the operation requirements of the seedling pick-up mechanism. According to the optimized parameters, the structure of the seedling pick-up mechanism was designed, a virtual prototype of the mechanism was created, and a physical prototype was manufactured. A virtual motion simulation of the mechanism was performed, high-speed photographic kinematics tests were conducted, and the kinematic properties of the physical prototype were investigated, whereby the correctness of the theoretical model and the optimized design of the mechanism were verified. Further, laboratory seedling pick-up tests were conducted. The success ratio of seedling pick-up was 93.8% when the seedling pick-up efficiency of the mechanism was 60 plants per minute per row, indicating that the mechanism has a high efficiency and success ratio for seedling pick-up and can be applied to a dryland plug seedling transplanter.

Design of Vegetable Pot Seedling Pick‑up Mechanism with Planetary Gear Train

It has been challenging to design seedling pick-up mechanism based on given key points and trajectories,because it involves dimensional synthesis and rod length optimization.In this paper,the dimensional synthesis of seedling pickup mechanism with planetary gear train was studied based on the data of given key points and the trajectory of the endpoint of seedling pick-up mechanism.Given the positions and orientations requirements of the five key points,the study first conducted a dimensional synthesis of the linkage size and center of rotation.The next steps were to select a reasonable solution and optimize the data values based on the ideal seedling trajectory.The link motion was driven by the planetary gear train of the two-stage gear.Four pitch curves of noncircular gears were obtained by calculating and distributing the transmission ratio according to the data.For the pitch curve with two convex points,the tooth profile design method of incomplete noncircular gear was applied.The seedling pick-up mechanism was tested by a virtual prototype and a physical prototype designed with the obtained parameter values.The results were consistent with the theoretical design requirements,confirming that the mechanism meets the expected requirements for picking seedlings up.This paper presents a new design method of vegetable pot seedling pick-up mechanism for an automatic vegetable transplanter.

Reverse design and tests of vegetable plug seedling pick-up mechanism of planetary gear train with non-circular gears

In the previous research,the seedling pick-up mechanism of the planetary gear train with incomplete eccentric circular gear and non-circular gears for vegetable plug seedlings still has two shortcomings.One is that not enough seedling pick-up depth leads to a low success ratio of seedling pick-up at high rotation speeds,the other is that the smaller seedling pushing angle results in poor seedling pushing effect.Therefore,the reverse design of the seedling pick-up mechanism based on its motion trajectory was carried out.The local trajectory of seedling pick-up and seedling pushing sections was adjusted to obtain the theoretical motion trajectory of the seedling pick-up mechanism.The cubic non-uniform B-spline curve was used to fit the adjusted trajectory.A novel seedling pick-up mechanism of the planetary gear train with non-circular gears was proposed,including three combined non-circular gears,four non-circular gears,one planetary carrier,and two seedling pick-up arms.The reverse design model of the mechanism was established.The analysis and design software of the mechanism was developed to obtain the mechanism parameters meeting design requirements.The virtual prototype of the mechanism was established and its physical prototype was manufactured.Through the virtual motion simulation and high-speed photographic kinematics bench tests of the mechanism,the kinematic model and results of reverse design of the mechanism were verified,with the kinematic performances of the mechanism prototype studied.The seedling pick-up tests of the mechanism were conducted in the laboratory.The success ratios of seedling pick-up were 94.2%,95.6% and 90.2% while the seedling pick-up efficiencies of the mechanism were 60,80 and 100 plants per minute per row,respectively.Besides,the seedling pushing effect was improved mush because of the greater seedling pushing angle.The seedling pick-up mechanism through revise design is of high value to be applied in the practical vegetable plug seedling transplanters.

Lightweight detection method for lotus seedpod in natural environment

In order to solve the problems of the current target detection algorithms,such as poor discrimination of occluded targets,multiple parameters,complex networks,large amounts of computation,and not conducive to the deployment of mobile terminals,a lightweight lotus seedpod detection method based on YOLOv5s model was proposed in this study.First,the dataset was augmented by using a combination of offline and online augmentation,which improved the adaptability and robustness of the model in complex environments.Then,a lightweight Ghost convolution module was introduced to replace the original convolution,and a lightweight bidirectional feature pyramid network was designed,which could enhance the feature extraction and fusion capability of the network and reduce the amount of calculation and model size;On this basis,the combination of WIoU loss function and Mish activation function was adopted to improve the accuracy of feature extraction.Finally,the knowledge distillation training strategy was used to ensure the proposed lightweight model has the learning ability of a complex network model,improving the recall and precision of model detection.The results of the ablation study show that the proposed method effectively improves the detection performance of the YOLOv5s model for lotus seedpods.The mean average precision of the improved model was 89.7%,compared with the original YOLOv5s model increased by 2.8%,and the parameters and FLOPs were reduced by 2.36M and 7.3G,respectively.Compared with other detection algorithm models,the proposed algorithm model has the advantages of less computation,smaller model size,and higher detection precision.Therefore,the proposed improved optimization method based on the YOLOv5s model can effectively detect lotus seedpods,which provides theoretical research and technical support for intelligent picking of lotus seedpods in the actual operating environment.

Design and tests of a rotary plug seedling pick-up mechanism for vegetable automatic transplanter

The rotary plug seedling pick-up mechanism for vegetable automatic transplanter is the technical bottleneck to improve the mechanization level of vegetable planting in China.In order to solve the problems of rotary seedling pick-up mechanism proposed in previous study,such as low success ratio of seedling pick-up at high speed,and interference between the seedling bowl and the end of the other seedling pick-up arm,a novel kind of rotary seedling pick-up mechanism of planetary gear train with combined type gears of incomplete denatured-eccentric-circular and non-circular gears was proposed.Through kinematic analysis of the seedling pick-up mechanism,the kinematics model was established.The computer-aided analysis and optimization software with human-computer interaction method was developed to realize parameters optimization of the seedling pick-up mechanism.Three-dimensional parametric design system of seedling pick-up mechanisms with combined non-circular gear transmission was developed for mechanism virtual simulation to verify the correctness of theoretical model and design results of the mechanism.The physical prototype of the mechanism was manufactured,and high-speed camera kinematics tests of the mechanism were conducted in the laboratory to study its kinematic characteristics.Laboratory seedling pick-up tests were carried out.The mechanism has the success ratio of seedling pick-up 96.3%without interference during seedling transporting when the rotation speed of the mechanism is 50 r/min and the seedling transplanting efficiency is 100 plants/min per row,showing that the novel mechanism has better working performance than the original one and could be applied in vegetable plug seedling transplanter.