ENERGY-EFFICIENT ARTIFICIAL POLLINATION DEVICE FOR TOMATO PRODUCTION UNDER PROTECTED AGRICULTURE

Climate change and human activities have led to a decline in insect pollinators. In recent years, the excessive use of agrochemicals has reduced the crop's natural insect pollinators. This sparked research to identify alternative natural insect pollinators and artificial technologies. Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) grown in protected facilities is increasing worldwide, this enforce the adoption of artificial pollination technologies as the protected environment does not allow insects for their free entry. This issue was addressed in the current experiment by designing and developing an energy-efficient, portable, and user-friendly artificial pollinator. The working mechanism of the device is designed to simulate natural buzz pollination through controlled mechanical vibrations. An Arduino-based control system was integrated into the device, with a DC motor and a scotch yoke mechanism, which was utilized for precise and impactful pollination. A compact electronic architecture was developed to deliver optimized vibration frequencies of 70, 85, and 100 Hz. To evaluate the performance of a newly developed machine, an experiment was performed on tomato flowers on the inclined-wire culture under protected conditions through a comparative analysis with natural pollination. Artificial pollination shows a significant enhancement in fruit conversion of tomato flowers. The consequence of artificial pollination showed that there was a change in the ratio of fruit set, where the vibration frequency of 85 Hz was observed to give the best result (81%). According to one-way ANOVA results, there was a significant effect of the vibration frequency on the fruit conversion percentage (F = 4.22, p = 0.009) since the frequency of 85 Hz gave the highest average fruit set (80.93%) among others. In general, the efficiency of the device proved to be high in repeated field operations. Calibration of the frequencies of the device was conducted by calibrating the speed of the motor by tachometer. Therefore, the outcomes of the study proved that vibration-assisted pollination is capable of being used as an alternative to natural pollinators. The pollination device provided an efficient solution to the problem. The research results support the use of artificial pollination devices for mimicking natural pollination.