Study and Evaluation of Ultrasound System for Detecting the Height of Corn Canopy

Introduction Growth of population, deficiency of resources, environmental hazards, fast spatial science progress and relevant subjects have resulted in significant effects of enhanced accuracy and modern technologies in agricultural technology and management methods. One of the modern technologies’ utilities in production and nondestructive tests is determination of product characteristics (such as product height), using electronic sensors at different stages of plant growth. In recent years, electric sensors improved widely in farm science. Regarding to wide performance of sensors, from simple sensors such as thermo, light and moisture sensors, to complex ones such as GPS and lidar, also the ability of electronic sensors to exact identification and measurement of special farm properties, makes these sensors to an important part of precision agriculture. The subject of this study is to identify and measure the height of the product using ultrasonic technology to automate control of breeding and harvesting operations. Suitable price and noise and dust resistance of ultrasonic sensor, make it an attractive subject in biosystem industries and farm operations. Materials and Methods Plant height measurement Ultrasonic sensor includes an ultrasonic transmitter and receiver with more than 20 kHz frequency. As other waves, ultrasonic waves diffuse constantly from a source by mechanical distracting in a gas, liquid or solid environment. The distance between sensor and object is a function of the wave passing time from generation point to receive point. Plant height calculated by estimating this distance and minus it from sensor height. The sensor used in this research had a diffuse angle of 40 degrees to center axis of source. The sensor ability to height measurement depends on leaves angle, leaves surface, plant aggregation in area and plant height. Leaves angle is the most important factor in recognization ability of ultrasonic sensor. Electronic system design The height measurement electronic system includes: 40 kHz Ultrasonic transmitter with diameter of 10 mm, 67 db ultrasonic receiver, Signal amplifier circuit (op-amp), AVR Microcontroller, (atmega 128) and a 64×128 pi LCD. Electronic part of system produces 40 kHz pulse initially and locates on one of the outlet bases of microcontroller. Then, this pulse is amplified and sent to ultrasonic sensor transmitter for maximum performance of the transmitter. The received pulse has low power so it shoud be amplified by an amplifier to be recognizable by the microcontroller. The received signal transmitted to digital signal by a high-speed 128 AVR atmega microcontroller. The sensor calibrated in the first phase using artificial barriers, the data analyzed by linear regression and paired mean comparison test in SPSS and EXCEL software. Results and Discussion Corn height measured by designed system in a test by 100 plots and 10 blocks. Thus, the blocks had a dimension of 1m length and 10cm width. System output recorded in first block and the block length passed by system with 10cm distances. Actual measurement accuracy comprised as pixels to data from manual measurement. The results didn’t show any significant difference between means. The regression coefficient of model was calculated 99%. The operating phase continued in a lab to measure maize height. The results showed high linear correlation between ultrasonic output voltage and manual measurement. This linear correlation led to present a linear regression model with the regression coefficient of 95%. Correlated mean comparison used for all of data too, i.e. the data obtained by the two measurement methods were compared by t-paired test. So it’s defensible that with 99% confidence, sensor can estimate the real value of height with high accuracy. Conclusions Utilization of measurement technologies and accuracy enhancement in agricultural production systems are unavoidable. In this research, corn height was measured accurately by ultrasonic technology. According to the results, identifying the presence or absence of plant, precision control of the operations (e.g. spraying) and measuring the height of the plants (to set the cutting height at combine harvester). Obviously, the produced device can identify plant height with precision, and can use in different phases of precision agriculture such as seeding row identification, machinery path determination to minimize plant’s loss, poison optimization and harvesting.