DEVELOPMENT AND TESTING OF A CITRUS YIELD MONITOR

Abstract

Sitespecific monitoring of citrus yield is important in understanding yield variability and its causes. Amicrocontrollerbased system was designed to automatically monitor citrus yield harvested into individual tubs. Themicrocontroller was interfaced with a differential global positioning system (DGPS), a flash memory key, two limit switches,a buzzer, and a counter, which provided position information, storage, triggering, acknowledgement, and counting,respectively. The microcontroller system was mounted on a special truck (goat) that handles fruit and fruit tubs in the groves.The system was designed such that whenever the fruit was dumped into the truck bed, DGPS information was acquired andthe counter and buzzer were triggered. The position information was then stored into a flash key and later downloaded to apersonal computer for data analysis and mapping. This article details the design and evaluation of the citrus yield monitoringsystem. The evaluation phase showed that the system was able to detect the dumping events and store the DGPS locations,100 and 98% of the time, respectively.