Development of Automatic Continuous Soil Sampling System

Abstract

An automatic continuous soil sampling system was designed and developed in this paper. This system samples and stores the pulverized soil, which was gathered after rotary tilling, into soil-cans at several sampling positions based on GPS data. After the pulverized soil was gathered into soil-cans, the soil moisture sensor was integrated, which enabled real-time moisture content measurement. The measured data from GPS was synchronized and saved with the position data making it was possible to draw the soil map easily. The required time of the soil sampling on a longitudinal direction in a field of 170m×30m was approximately 50 minutes at 0.3m/s average working speed, and the sampling area was divided into a mesh of 10m×5m each.