Determination of Efficiency of Lightened Guidance System on Agricultural Machinery: A Case Study on Fertilizer Broadcaster

Abstract

Recently, intensive researches are carried out on tractor guidance system by the researchers. One of these systems which aim to ease for operators is lightened guidance system in agricultural applications. Basic elements of the lightened guidance system are GPS receiver and light bar. The system is to provide as a parallel tracking according to based reference track. The operator steers simply the vehicle manually, using the lightbar as a guide for staying on track. Therefore, uniformity at row spacing on field is provided by the lightbar. In this study, geographical coordinate data during the granule fertilization application by using a fertilizer broadcaster was collected and analyzed. Three different operators drove the tractor with and without assistance of lightened guidance system. The collected data in both situations were mapped by the ARCGIS 9.3 software. Then, mean row spacing and deviations from row spacing were determined. The efficiency of the lightened guidance system was tested for broadcast fertilizer treatment. While row spacing values with guidance system were changed from 1815.07 cm to 1824.53 cm, row spacing values without guidance system were changed from 1360.44 cm to 1880.12 cm for three operators. More uniform rows were obtained when the tractor (with fertilizer broadcaster) driven with the assistance of guidance system.

Keywords

• Precision agriculture,guidance system

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