Estimating the Reaction Force Received from the Soil by the Root Cutting Blade for Spinach Automatic Harvester

Abstract

Agricultural workers have required automatic harvesters due to aging of the Japanese recently. Spinach is one of the difficult vegetables to harvest automatically. Therefore, Shinshu University proposed a harvesting method called "passive handling". The previous works revealed that the difference in root cutting blade path resulted in a difference in harvest success rate. However, it is not known what factors make a difference in harvest success rate. In the future, it will be necessary to model the relationship between the root cutting blade and the soil in order to establish a route design method for the root cutting blade and facilitate route evaluation. In this study, we model the reaction force acting between the root cutting blade and the soil to guide future pathway formation.