Development Of Small-harvester Operation Information Monitoring System

As a large agricultural country, farm mechanization serves as a requisite measure for agricultural development and increase in farmers’ income in China. Harvester has hitherto become the principal means for the rice and wheat harvests and gained rapid development. Nevertheless, it was demonstrated through investigations on the existing conditions of domestic small harvesters that they only reflected the mechanical operations without applications of intelligence or automation technology, wherein the aftermarket usage and quality could not be tracked; the operating information could not be automatically collected; and the harvest area could not be automatically measured for statistics; most importantly, they exhibited high failure rate due to larger variations in the environmental conditions during the harvest, and locked rotors often occurred, causing abnormal operation to the machine and getting it to come to a halt, when the threshing device was generally required to be cleaned and restarted, without advance warning. Therefore, the efficiency and popularization of the agricultural machinery were affected.Given this, based on the development status quo and the technical level of the job information monitoring system for harvesters both home and aboard, in this paper, a set of remote monitoring system of job information for small harvesters was developed, with integration of fault pre-diagnosis and automatic monitoring of the operation process, aiming to achieve the following functions of small harvesters, such as real-time monitoring of the operating status, automatically recording and saving the operating date and time, as well as positioning the working region and measuring the harvest area; meanwhile, automatically pre-diagnosing the failure of locked rotor, which could enable the operator to adjust the harvesting speed in time to prevent shutting down of the machine. And all the monitoring data will be transmitted to the network terminal through wireless module.The primary contents of this paper are presented as follows:(1) By reviewing a great number of literatures and conducting field investigations, it was demonstrated that the applications of intelligence and automation technology on domestic small harvesters remained blank; the overall research goal was eventually developed through analysis of the investigation and application statuses of the real-time monitoring system of field operation for harvesters both home and abroad as well as the research trend of the monitoring system for domestic harvesters.(2) The locked rotor of the threshing cylinder of the small harvester was analyzed in detail, through which the overall design scheme and technical requirements of its pre-warning were eventually determined.(3) GPS was employed to conduct real-time tracking and monitoring of the operation status and region of the small harvester.(4) The shortcomings of traditional methods to measure the harvest area and the area-measuring principle of the existing handheld portable GPS measuring instrument were both analyzed; Moreover, through the positioning trajectory of the mechanical GPS, plus the corresponding algorithm, the automatic measurement of the harvest area during the harvesting process of the harvester was finally realized.(5) GPRS wireless transmission module was employed to transmit all the monitoring data to the network terminal for real-time view, which proved conducive for the agricultural machinery management to track the usage of the harvester.(6) A monitoring system for small harvesters with the microcontroller PIC18F4550single-chip microcomputer as the control core was designed; and furthermore, the application software for the monitoring system and the upper computer software were both prepared.(7) It was shown through experiments that the system operated stably and reliably to favorably achieve the desired goal.