Yongjie Cui, Longsheng Fu
College of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering, Northwest A&F University

With the development of economy and the decrease of agricultural labor force, the increasing of labor cost not only affects the traditional agricultural production seriously, but also becomes a social problem being concerned. In addition, technology and equipment for modern agricultural production are much more focusing on improving the efficiency of agricultural production and ensuring the safety of agricultural products. Therefore, informatization and labor saving technology, such as mechanization and automation, for agricultural machinery should be studied for modern agricultural equipment. In United States, Japan, and other developed countries and regions, the robot and IT technology have been applied in the agricultural production and showed a good result.
In China, the research on mechanization and automation equipment for fruit and vegetable production is behind traditional crops such as wheat and rice. And thus, the study on equipments for facility agriculture and orchard becomes a new bright spot. In this report, we will give an introduction mainly about seedling grafting equipment for the facility agriculture and harvesting equipment for kiwifruit which is the second production fruit in Shaanxi province. It mainly included: the automation equipment of seedling and grafting, kiwifruit harvesting robot, and kiwifruit grading system.
1) In order to research on seedling industry and grafting equipment, the processes of grafting seedling production from planting to grafting should be studied since they are closely linked to each other. Therefore, this research mainly includes directional seeding device, detection method of seedling growth, automatic device for supplying grafting seedlings, grafting device and transplanting device.
2) Research on kiwifruit harvesting robot is mainly on information perception and end-effector. By identifying the target fruit accurately from the complex background one by one during day and night, extracting fruit feature information, determining fruit picking order and fruit positions, and providing basis for the end-effector closing target fruit automatically with the information perception technology under natural environment. The end-effector is working as imitation of artificial picking method. It closes the target fruit from the bottom firstly, and then separate the adjacent fruit from each other, after that, rotates the fruit until its stem is bent enough and the end-effector rises itself to make the stem being divided from the fruit appropriately.
3) Research on kiwifruit grading system includes classification standard, quality inspection and small grading device.
Different from informatization and labor saving technology in industry, there are many disadvantages in agricultural production since the unstable and complex environment and the great variety in crops. One solution is that human-machine collaborative model which might help us extent and applies more research achievements to the agricultural production in the future.