1Scientist, Department of Farm Machinery & Power Engineering, Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana-141004, India
2Principal Extension Scientist, Department of Farm Machinery & Power Engineering, Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana-141004, India
*Corresponding author's e-mail address: shivkumarlohan@pau.edu
Online Published on 16 July, 2024.
Mechanical transplanters are adopted to reduce the drudgery in manual transplanting. Operating a 2-wheel paddy transplanter requires more human involvement compared to various other commercially available manual and self-propelled paddy transplanters. Operator has to walk 10–22 km behind the machine in a day in puddled field conditions under high temperature (38–44°C) and humid conditions (70–80% relative humidity). To reduce the physical workload of an operator, an integrated control lever actuating mechanism with gear motors was developed to operate a 2-wheel paddy transplanter remotely. The inductive proximity sensors (SN04-N distance detector) were used to control the crank rotation position of the gear motor drives (BTS 7960). A microcontroller (STM32F4) was used to connect with the auto-driver kit to control the motor mechanism and sensors. The auto-driver kit comprised a range of accessories, a tangible programmable circuit board, and software running on a PC. It facilitated the writing and uploading of computer code, presented in a simplified version of C++, onto the physical board. The field performance results revealed an increase in effective field capacity from 0.158 ± 0.02 ha.h−1 to 0.175± 0.04 ha.h−1, and thereby resulting in 11% increase in area covered per day with the development and adoption of remote-control system. Optimized results for the paddy transplanter with remote-control system revealed maximum effective capacity (0.178 ha.h−1), higher field efficiency (73.74%), minimal missed hills (1.94%), and a minimum root mean square error of 169 mm at a soil puddling settlement period of 48 hours and a forward speed of 2.0 km.h−1. Moreover, with the adoption of remote-control system, there is 85% reduction in human fatigue in terms of human postural analysis and overall discomfort. In addition, the labour requirement reduced from 20± 1 to 13± 1 man-h. ha−1 (about 40% reduction). As compared to the existing walk-behind type paddy transplanter, with the developed remote-control system the net profit and benefit-cost ratio increased up to 18.50 to 26.61% and 34.10 to 51.63% per year, respectively. The developed remotecontrolled system for a 2-wheel paddy transplanter resulted in increased work productivity, profitability and reduced fatigue among operators/farm workers.
Human drudgery, Paddy transplanter, Performance evaluation, Remote-controlled paddy transplanter
