Browse Topic: Agricultural vehicles and equipment
This SAE Standard provides a uniform method to calculate the lift capacity of knuckle-boom log loaders and certain forestry equipment. It establishes definitions and specifies machine conditions for calculations. This document applies to knuckle-boom log loaders as defined in ISO 6814 and ISO 17591 and certain forestry equipment defined in ISO 6814 that have a rotating upper-structure such as feller bunchers, forwarders, harvesters, and behind the cab or rear-mounted knuckle-boom log loaders not having their own power supply. It does not apply to harvesters that are incapable of lifting a tree or log completely off the ground. This document applies to those machines that are crawler, rubber-tired, and pedestal or stationary mounted.
Before Monarch existed in 2015, its cofounders CTO Zachary Omohundro and CEO Praveen Penmetsa traveled to India to assemble two electric and connected tractors they had shipped over in crates. They went to a local village and had a plan to deploy the vehicles. “We had a text messaging-based reservation system that the villagers ended up saying, ‘Nope, we're not going to use that at all,’” Omohundro told Truck & Off-Highway Engineering. Instead, the local farmers wanted to work through a local man who knew how to operate tractors. So, they pivoted.
This SAE Recommended Practice describes the classification of off-road tires and rims designed specifically for forestry machines (refer to SAE J1116), defines related terminology in common use, and shows representative construction details of component parts.
The Vision for Off-road Autonomy (VORA) project used passive, vision-only sensors to generate a dense, robust world model for use in off-road navigation. The research resulted in vision-based algorithms applicable to defense and surveillance autonomy, intelligent agricultural applications, and planetary exploration. Passive perception for world modeling enables stealth operation (since lidars can alert observers) and does not require more expensive or specialized sensors (e.g., radar or lidar). Over the course of this three-phase program, SwRI built components of a vision-only navigation pipeline and tested the result on a vehicle platform in an off-road environment.
The automation of labor-intensive picking and planting operations is having an immediate impact in the agricultural indutry. In its simplest form, robotic automation can reduce the labor and soil disturbance while enabling organic soil cover and increasing species diversification through precision approaches to planting, weeding, and spraying. With this, pesticides and fertilizers can be applied in a more targeted way, and with machinery visiting fields more frequently, earlier and more targeted intervention can occur before pests become established. Small, Mobile, and Autonomous Agricultural Robots identifies issues that need to be resolved fo for this technology to thrive, including improving methods of acquiring and labeling training data to facilitate more accurate models for specific applications. It also discusses concepts such as general-purpose mechanical platforms for use as carriers of agricultural automation systems with high stability, positional accuracy, and variable
Made from renewable materials like biomass and agricultural waste, sustainable aviation fuel has enormous potential to decarbonize the aviation industry. But widespread adoption has yet to take off.
There is an increasing effort to reduce noise pollution across different industries worldwide. From a transportation standpoint, pass-by regulations aim to achieve this and have been implementing increasingly stricter emissions limits. Testing according to these standards is a requirement for homologation, but does little to help manufacturers understand why their vehicles may be failing to meet limits. Using a developed methodology such as Pass-by Source Path Contribution (SPC, also known as TPA) allows for identification of dominant contributors to the pass-by receivers along with corresponding acoustic source strengths. This approach is commonly used for passenger vehicles, but can be impractical for off-highway applications, where vehicles are often too large for most pass-by-suitable chassis dynamometers. A hybrid approach is thereby needed, where the same techniques and instrumentation used in the indoor test are applied to scenarios in an outdoor environment. This allows for
A Northwestern University-led team of researchers has developed a new fuel cell that harvests energy from microbes living in dirt. About the size of a standard paperback book, the completely soil-powered technology could fuel underground sensors used in precision agriculture and green infrastructure. This potentially could offer a sustainable, renewable alternative to batteries, which hold toxic, flammable chemicals that leach into the ground, are fraught with conflict-filled supply chains and contribute to the ever-growing problem of electronic waste.
Traditional silicon-based solar cells are completely opaque, which works for solar farms and roofs but would defeat the purpose of windows. However, organic solar cells, in which the light absorber is a kind of plastic, can be transparent.
Researchers from the Disruptive and Sustainable Technologies for Agricultural Precision (DiSTAP) interdisciplinary research group of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, in collaboration with Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory (TLL) and MIT, have developed a groundbreaking near-infrared (NIR) fluorescent nanosensor capable of simultaneously detecting and differentiating between iron forms — Fe(II) and Fe(III) — in living plants.
These general operator precautions apply to off-road work machines as defined in SAE J1116. These should not be considered as all-inclusive for all specific uses and unique features of each particular machine. Other more specific operator precautions not mentioned herein should be covered by users of this recommended practice for each particular machine application.
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