In this article, a review of the mechanisms that have been developed to improve the efficiency of Chinese jujube (Ziziphus Jujuba Mill) was made. This fruit is considered as an economic crop in the arid and semiarid regions especially in China, where the cultivation methods alternate between traditional and intensive. In the former the trees are large and planted with relatively wide space, whereas in the latter the trees are dwarfed with tight spacing among them. Mechanisms which were studied and tested, for each cultivation method, were summarized and compared in terms of fruit collecting efficiency and rate of damage. These mechanisms were branch beating, trunk shaking, air shaking for traditional cultivation and tree shaking, canopy shaking, and vacuum suction for intensive cultivation. The comparison indicated that as the efficiency increase for any single mechanism the rate of damage increases accordingly. Therefore, a combination of mechanism would maintain the efficiency and reduce damage. In particular, a combination of a mechanism of tree shaking, developed earlier for blueberry, and trunk shaking was thought to be with high potential of low rate of damage. This article also spots on the possibilities of fully automating the post-harvest operation of fruit grading by describing a number of previous articles that have tackled fruit sorting not only for fruit processing but also for fresh market. The hope is that this review will spark the renewal of research and development of the cultivation of Chinese jujube so as to meet the increasing demand.

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Processing watermelon seeds has recently attained great attention in industry from two aspects of snack and high quality oil productions. Hence, in the first phase of our research, studying their drying kinetics, color quality in terms of L* a* b*, total color difference (ΔE), chroma and Hue angle and germination vigor of watermelon seeds were studied experimentally in detail with three drying air temperatures (40, 50 and 60 °C) along with three levels of air velocity (0.5, 1 and 1.5 m s⁻¹). It was concluded that well-known Verma et al. thin layer drying model was greatly superior for prediction of watermelon seed drying kinetics in most cases while the effective moisture diffusivity of seeds was found ranging between 3.009 × 10⁻¹⁰ and 6.805 × 10⁻¹¹ m² s⁻¹ and the energy of activation was evaluated between 37.11 and 56.63 kJ mol⁻¹. It was also inferred that air temperature level more profoundly affected the color and germination of the seeds than velocity while to maintain color quality and germination vigor high, the convectively drying temperatures should not exceed 50 °C.

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Micro-nano bubble, electro-oxidation and ozone treatment of wastewater is widely accepted. In this study the effect of these technologies as a pre-treatment process in removing fluoride was observed and compared. The wastewater from Kumho Petrochemical Co. Ltd. (final product is synthetic resins) containing BF₃ was infused with micro-nano bubble, electro-oxidation and ozone gas for 2 h and then pH adjustment was done by adding Ca(OH)₂. PAC 11%, F900 and Alum were used after that and then polymer was added. The micro-nano bubble pre-treatment shows better removal percentages than those of electro-oxidation and ozone pre-treatment. The combination of F900 and A-polymer with micro-nano bubble pre-treated wastewater seems to have a higher fluoride removal percentage than the other combinations (76.7%) whereas without pre-treatment, the maximum fluoride removal percentage was observed to be 69.6%. %. Therefore, an increase of 7.1% was obtained over traditional treatment for air bubble pre-treatment. For electro-oxidation and ozone pre-treatment, fluoride removal percentages were somewhat within the same range with no pre-treatment values. In case of COD removal, the combination of F900 and A-polymer with micro-nano bubble pre-treated wastewater was observed to be the best (63.6%) whereas without pre-treatment, the maximum COD removal percentage was observed to be 54.9%. For electro-oxidation and ozone pre-treatment, COD removal percentage was found without the range of 31.4%–47.5%, which is even lower than without pre-treatment values.

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Drying behavior of corn (Zea mays L) was studied in a hot air-infrared dryer. The effects of inlet air temperature (40, 50 and 60 °C), infrared radiation intensity (1000, 2000 and 3000 W/m²), and modes of drying bed (fixed and vibratory) were investigated on grain moisture variation during drying process. Corn kernels were dehydrated from the initial moisture content of 24.5 ± 0.5% (w.b) to final moisture content of 14 ± 0.2%. The thin layer drying characteristics was experimentally investigated and appropriate mathematical drying models were correlated with temperature and radiation intensity. Among models fitted to experimental data, the Page model was found to be the best model for describing drying behavior of corn in thin layer drying form. The effective moisture diffusivity ranged from 0.6170 × 10⁻⁸ to 4.6432 × 10⁻⁸ m²/s for the fixed bed mode and 0.8021 × 10⁻⁸ to 5.5533 × 10⁻⁸ m²/s for the vibratory bed mode.

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One of the challenging problems of the cutter-bars is the damaging effect of stones on their blades. This problem is much bigger while harvesting short plants. One of the valuable but short height crops is lentil, which can grow well in stony fields. Lentil in most countries especially in West Asia and North Africa (WANA) is harvested by hand.
In order to overcome the problem of blades damaging, a new mechanism was designed and fabricated. Each blade has its own safety mechanism and so can show flexion independently. The harvester was tested in lentil farms which were rein-fed and manually distributing planted. Forward speed, knife speed and carousel speed were the independent variables that their impacts on both product losses and cutting height were evaluated. The obtained data was analyzed by Design Expert software and two quadratic stepwise models with the R² of 0.9505 and 0.9046 were obtained for losses and cutting-height respectively. The results showed that forward speed has the greatest impact on both of losses and cutting height.
On the other hand, the new cutter-bar and a conventional one with almost equal blades, working widths and cutting height were tested in lentil farm. The conventional cutter-bar had lost half of its blades after a while but there was not any damaged blade of the new cutter-bar.
Finally, forward speed of 2 kmh⁻¹, carousel speed of 34.83 rpm and knife speed of 476 rpm was recognized as the best working set-up for the testing region.

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In this study, two types of worker posture recognition systems were developed to recognize 18 fundamental worker posture types. The two systems used worker silhouette features and the eight color marker posture types to express the targeted worker posture types. In the first system, a posture lookup table was designed to correct the misrecognized postures. In the second system, a random forests algorithm of a machine learning algorithm was used to train the decision trees to recognize targeted postures. Additionally, two worker assistance systems, which were a pea field task monitoring system and a container carrying posture recognition system, were developed to demonstrate an applicability of the two posture recognition systems for an agricultural field. In our experiments, the total recognition rates of the two worker posture recognition systems were respectively around 90%. Moreover, the pea field task monitoring system could robustly track the workflow of watering and seeding for producing peas. The container carrying posture recognition system could robustly detect the carrying postures. The experimental results demonstrated the high performance and applicability of the two worker posture recognition systems for developing an autonomous agricultural robot.

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This research aims to develop an on-line apple bruise detection system, using chlorophyll fluorescence images for nondestructive apple bruise detection and analysis. The on-line apple bruise detection system is consisted of a fluorescent image acquisition unit, a fruit carrying revolving tray unit, a conveying unit, and a control unit. The LabVIEW graphical programming language was used to build the control program, and Vision Assistant was used for image processing and analysis. The wavelength of the fluorescence excitation source used was 460 nm. A color camera captured the fluorescence released from Golden Delicious apple, and the wavelength was 680 ± 10 nm. The fruit was revolved by the fruit carrying revolving tray, 60° each time, revolved six times, so as to shoot the complete apple surface. The image processing procedures of bruise recognition include image preprocessing, medium filtering, regional binarization, background removal, noise filtering and hole filling for recognition, and analysis of bruise blocks. This study applied 67.9 ± 4.84N, 82.1 ± 4.57N and 102 ± 8.44N impact forces to apples respectively to make bruises. The test results showed that the proposed on-line apple bruise detection system could recognize the apple bruise 100% after 45 min from the impact on apples. The prototype system could inspect 92 apples for bruise automatically hourly on an average. This study has successfully built an on-line apple bruise detection system, and the inspection of the system may be accelerated in the future for commercial uses.

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To apply Spread Spectrum (SS) sound-based positioning system in green house, measurement accuracy was investigated by using Base- Station (BS) for compensating temperature. In this experiment, normalized correlation value and correlation ratio were used to detect correlation peak of direct wave of SS sound. When 9 positions in actual greenhouse were measured, success rate to detect direct wave of SS sound was 99%. As the result, this correlation peak detection method is useful to detect correlation peak of direct wave. Average measurement error at each position was 55 mm and improved about 20 mm by using BS method. Moreover, when center correlation peak was detected, average measurement error was 15.5 mm. Thus, BS method enables SS sound-based positioning system to be useful in green house.

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