Development of an exterior-mount real time sugar beet yield monitoring system for a sugar beet harvester

Abstract

The main priorities in crop production are increasing the yield and decreasing the cost of production. Precision farming is the best practice to approach these goals. For real time measurement of sugar beet yield, a yield monitor was developed, and installed on the exterior side of the harvester’s chassis. The advantage of this arrangement over similar systems is the location of the load cell and system’s frame which prevents blockage by trash, mud or plant roots. For measurement of weight, one load cell on each side of the harvester chassis was used. Conveyor and ground speeds were measured using two proximity sensors. Because vibrations of the harvester can affect the output signals, it is necessary to find the main bandwidth associated with the weights moving on the conveyor. For this purpose, three different masses were placed on the moving conveyor and this bandwidth was determined using signal processing. Then, a suitable filter was designed and undesirable frequencies acting as noise were attenuated. After calibrating all the sensors, final evaluation of the system was performed in the field and the mean and standard deviation of error were 6.48% and 1.52, respectively. Although the error may seem to be somewhat high but the low of standard deviation indicates that there is a similar error in all tests. These negative errors indicate that the weight is systematically overestimated by the monitor. Thus, the error can be reduced by minor changes in conveyor shape or modified by software means. By software modification, the systematic error was alleviated. The median sugar beet yield was thus obtained to be 42.7 t/ha. Comparing this with the actual mean yield of 41.8 t/ha, it differs by only about 2%.