FABRICATION OF SUGARCANE NODE CUTTING MACHINE

Abstract

Sugarcane (Saccharum sp.) is a clonally propagated grass of the Gramineae family characterized by a high degree of polyploidy and is a crop of major importance providing about 65% of the world sugar. Reproductive tissue is harvested as the economic product in nearly all field crops but this is not the case in sugarcane. In sugarcane, the stalks are the harvested tissue and stalk size has a major influence on yield. There has been virtually some research reported on the variation in size of individual stalk internodes with position on the stalk and with crop growth. Sugarcane planting with traditional methods is costly, time-consuming and necessary compression of buds in the field is not achieved easily because of stalk planting in sugarcane. In traditional planting method, great human force and high volume of sugarcane stalk in hectare is required. To solve this problem and mechanizing of sugarcane planting, the application of machine vision system and image processing methods to identify nodes from sugarcane and to plant it as a seed by planting machines is suggested in this work.
The number of applications using machine vision and digital image processing techniques in the agricultural sector is increasing rapidly. These applications include land/aerial remote sensing of crops, detection and recognition of pathological stress conditions, shape and color characterization of fruits, among many other topics. The presented work is an application of image processing for the purpose of sugarcane node cutting at appropriate intervals. A complete frame with conveyor, blade, camera is fabricated for the purpose.