SASTech - Technical Journal of RUAS

The primary goal of the study is to design and development of a pepper plucking equipment to facilitate pepper harvesting in the agricultural sector. Pepper, the king of spices is one of the oldest and the best known spices in the world. At present the pepper harvesting is done manually by the laborers climbing on the trees. So in order to avoid climbing and to solve the problems related in this field it is essential to have pepper plucking equipment. Though India is an agricultural country and majority of the population depends on agriculture for their lively hood, there is shortage of labor in some of the agricultural sectors. Nowadays this labor problem is more acute. Thus innovative methods are to be adopted to solve the problem of shortage of labor.

For designing of pepper plucking equipment, it is very important to understand the customer's needs, main suggestions from the users and the trends in the market. A detailed ethnography research has been done in the pepper harvesting field for understanding the problems facing the area. Literature review, GEMBA studies and customer survey, market study etc has been done. From the output of the data analysis, Quality Function Deployment (QFD), & the product design specifications were made. According to the PDS five different concepts were generated in order to overcome the usability, safety and the ergonomic issues related to the problem.

The selection of the final concept was done by customer preference. Then, with the help of Dot matrix method a comparative ranking has been done by giving certain Weightage. On the basis of that, the concept which obtained highest score has been selected as the most feasible concept. The selected concept was developed into a 1: 1 working model. After conducting feasibility test the model was validated. So it can be very well concluded that the development of such kind of equipments will surely find a place in the market.