Displacement tracking of harvester rods of a coffee harvester

Abstract

There is a certain difficulty by grower to properly regulate the coffee harvester for a specific condition of each harvest. To know the vibratory motion of the harvester rods during harvesting is the first step to find the best machine settings. This study aimed to track the trajectory performed by the rods in terms of amplitude and vibration frequency using instrumentation and signal processing techniques. For this, a low cost system composed of an open-source electronic prototyping platform Arduino and an accelerometer was proposed. With the proposed system, vibration signals were collected and processed via MatLab. The results showed the complete two-dimensional trajectory performed by the rods in different settings. From the achieved trajectories it is possible to better understand the harvesting rods behavior and extract important features like the maximum displacement in both vertical and horizontal motion, which can be very useful to define the best harvesting settings.