Vibration Analysis of a Long Boom for a Farm Machine

Crop phenotyping is frequently used by breeders and crop scientists to monitor growth of plants and to relate them to plants genotypes. Seemingly, this contributes to better crop growth and results in higher yield. Instead of traditional crop monitoring, which is labor intensive, high-throughput phenotyping (HTP) platforms using ground-based vehicle have several advantages (in speed, efficiency, and cost) over manual methods. A wheeled mobile platform for HTP was developed, and automated data collection were performed for different traits of canola and wheat. These data were compared with manual measured data. In this paper, vibration analysis of a relatively long cantilever boom attached to a vehicle is reported. The paper investigates how different factors influence the boom attached to a regular farming machine, its vibration, and effects on phenotyping sensors attached to the boom.