1986 Volume 48 Issue 2 Pages 169-179
In order to develop the artificial tactile sense of the agricultural robots for harvesting, sorting and grading tho farm products and controlling their qualities, the hardware and software for measuring the hardness which reflect the maturity and freshness were designed and discussed. The author introduced the ARMA method using the random excitation for real time estimation of the parameters which could indicate the hardness of the farm products considered as the linear viscoelastic body and applied the average response method for obtaining the output signal of the high SN ratio. Eased upon these measurement techniques, the viscoelastic parameters indicating hardness of the farm products were estimated and the variation of the quality during storage under various conditions was investigated. As the results of these investigations, it was revealed that the hardness of apple flesh could be detected by the methods developed in this paper and the variation of hardness could be restrained by keeping the storage temperature lower and/or by wrapping the fruits with the polychroride vinylidene film.
