Enhancing Crop Harvesting with Ultrasonic Stubble Height Sensing Technology

Crop stubble refers to the residual plant material, primarily stems and leaves, that remains in the field after the harvest of the primary crop. In modern farming practices, considering the customer requirement, knowing the crop stubble height is a critical variable in agricultural management to plan for uniform crop cuts by adjusting the header’s cutter height of the harvester. The potential outcome of this research includes an accurate and non-contact stubble height measurement system utilizing ultrasonic sensing technology. The study involves the design and development of an algorithm to calculate short-range and long-range distances using ultrasonic sensors by processing the raw ultrasonic reflections. The proposed algorithm has different signal processing options to convert the raw ultrasonic signal to the distance. These distances are then mapped to the distance from the ground, distance from the cut end of the stubble and resulting stubble height. Setup with the sensor mount is created to mimic the actual field environment and the height detection algorithm is evaluated on corn and wheat crop stubbles. Multiple trials are carried out using the static and dynamic setup for different heights of the stubble. For these trials, the calculated stubble height closely matches with the actual stubble height. Keywords: Combine harvester, stubble height sensing, ultrasonic sensing, Non-Contact Sensing, uniform crop cut, Stubble Management, Agricultural Sensors, Harvest Residue Detection.