Development of Transportation Vehicle for Supporting Harvest

The burden reduction for workers is one of the fundamental problems in the agricultural field. In this research, we developed the vehicle that motorized a small vehicle for reducing the burden on agricultural workers at the greenhouse. The proposed vehicle equips the clutch, the operation bar, and Laser Range Finder. The clutch can switch between electric and non-electric, and the operation bar can operate the transport vehicle without using hands. LRF is used to improve the movement of the vehicle among harvesting work. Hence, the operator of the proposed vehicle can perform the harvesting operation and the operation of the transport vehicle at the same time to realize the reduction of burden. Moreover, to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed system, we conducted several experiments on the greenhouse in Nara prefecture. These results demonstrated that the proposed vehicle could support the crop harvest in the greenhouse.