There are numerous hazards found on the farms. Most of them are ignored, which might cause the farmer to pay later in terms of his ill health, potential injuries or death. The current article discusses some of the common issues such as dust and air quality concerns; environmental (weather) stressors and psychological stressors; noise and hearing protection; and tractor safety and seatbelt use. And finally, the recommendations to overcome the hazards are discussed.

In order to reduce the influence of ground vibration generated by tractor during driving and operation on driving stability and driver ride comfort, this paper proposes a control method of tractor active seat suspension based on model predictive control. By establishing a 3-degree of freedom tractor active seat suspension model and a ground excitation input model, a new model predictive controller for the active seat suspension system is designed. The vertical acceleration of the seat center of mass, the seat suspension stroke and the tire dynamic displacement are optimized by limiting the dynamic deflection of the seat suspension and the active force output of the actuator. The control model of MPC tractor active seat suspension system is built and its performance is simulated and verified. The results show that compared with the passive seat suspension and the PID seat suspension, the tractor active seat suspension based on model predictive control (MPC) has better damping characteristics and improves ride comfort.

Due to the shortage of agricultural labor forces and rapid aging of farmers, the utilization of tractors is becoming popular and essential in Korea. Tractors can be classified into two types, a walking tractor called as a power tiller and a riding tractor. In this study, agricultural tractors including walking and riding types were categorized into 4 levels by rated output power. And diesel emission inventory of tractors was established and analyzed using 2011 and 2019 survey data in Korea. Emission inventory including CO, NOx, SOx, TSP(PM10), PM2.5, VOCs and NH3 were established using Tier 3 methodology. The total amount of emission using agricultural tractors was decreased about 13% from 2011 to 2019. The number of walking tractors were decreased by about 19% in 8 years, on the other hand that of riding tractors were increased by about 12%. However, the emission reduction is about 48% for walking tractors and the emission increment is about 5% for riding tractors. Thus, the total emission from agricultural tractors was decreased by about 16% in those periods. It is due to the decrease of 21% and 15% in the hours of use of walking and riding tractors, respectively, in 2019. Walking tractors mainly emit air pollutants from spraying and transporting. Riding tractors mainly 61% of total air pollutants emits from soil preparation and transporting operations. Geographic information system (GIS) was used to spatially assign air pollutants variables into 17 provinces and metropolitan cities in Korea. High emission generating regions and changes of emissions during 8 years were clearly seen in GIS analysis. High air pollutant emitting regions are mainly located in the western and southern regions of Korea, which have plenty of arable areas compared to other regions in Korea.

Off-road vehicles and transportation are vital for agricultural economics, yet the transition to green energies is challenging. To make this application easier, a tool that enables the testing of heavy-duty off-road vehicles in various scenarios was created. Based on the methods of the World Harmonized Transient Cycle, a new Hybrid Operational Cycle that reflects the features of agricultural work was created and applied in a graphical model simulation. This was a newly developed methodology. The cycle and the model were based on gathered research data. A numerical model of a medium-power tractor with an internal combustion engine and a series-hybrid setup was created, and simulations were performed in Matlab and AVL Cruise. The research compared both diesel and hybrid vehicles in terms of their power production, fuel consumption, and efficiency in fieldwork and transportation scenarios. The research showed that a series-hybrid transmission can achieve an efficiency similar to that of tractors with a continuously variable transmission (CVT), but with the use of an electric powertrain, there is still an opportunity to exploit energy regeneration in transportation and under low-load conditions. The designed model also may be used for the development of control algorithms for hybrid drives and the improvement of the efficiency thereof.

This work deals with finding out whether the heart rate values of operators of forwarding machines during the work shift are influenced by the individual activities that the operator has to perform during timber skidding, or by the operators themselves. Furthermore, the work deals with determining the difficulty of individual activities in terms of physical load. For this purpose, the work shift of operators carrying out timber skidding was divided into individual activities: Driving, Maintenance, Forwarding, Break. During these work activities, the heart rate of each operator was taken for subsequent evaluation. The results show that the highest pulse rates of the operators were achieved during the Maintenance of the entrusted machine, while the highest pulse fluctuations in the operators were recorded during Forwarding. As part of this activity, the highest heart rate of the entire measurement process was recorded (132.0000 bpm), but also the lowest (42.0000 bpm). Furthermore, it was proven that both the operator and the activity he performs affect the pulse rate. The activities themselves did not differ from each other in only one of the six cases of comparison. Specifically, it was Driving and Forwarding.

An improved anti-noise morphology vision navigation algorithm is proposed for intelligent tractor tillage in a complex agricultural field environment. At first the two key steps, Guided Filtering and improved anti-noise morphology navigation line extraction were addressed in detail. Then the experiments were carried out in order to verify the effectiveness and advancement of the presented algorithm. Finally, the optimal template and it’s application condition were studied for improving the image processing speed. The comparison experiment results show that the YCbCr color space has minimum time consumption of 0.094 s in comparison with HSV, HIS and 2R-G-B color spaces. The Guided Filtering method can effectively distinguish the boundary between the new and old soil than other competing vanilla methods such as Tarel, Multi-scale Retinex, Wavelet-based Retinex and Homomorphic Filtering inspite of having the fastest processing speed of 0.113 s. The extracted soil boundary line of the improved anti-noise morphology algorithm has best precision and speed compared with other operators such as Sobel, Roberts, Prewitt and Log. After comparing different size of image template, the optimal template with the size of 140×260 pixels can meet high precision vision navigation while the course deviation angle is not more than 7.5°. The maximum tractor speed of the optimal template and global template are 51.41 km/h and 27.47 km/h respectively which can meet real-time vision navigation requirement of the smart tractor tillage operation in the field. The experimental vision navigation results demonstrated the feasibility of the autonomous vision navigation for tractor tillage operation in the field using the new and old soil boundary line extracted by the proposed improved anti-noise morphology algorithm which has broad application prospect.

An improved anti-noise morphology vision navigation algorithm is proposed for intelligent tractor tillage in a complex agricultural field environment. Firstly, the two key steps, Guided Filtering and improved anti-noise morphology navigation line extraction, were addressed in detail. Then the experiments were carried out in order to verify the effectiveness and advancement of the presented algorithm. Finally, the optimal template and its application condition were studied for improving the image processing speed. The comparison experiment results show that the YCbCr color space has minimum time consumption, 0.094 s, compared with HSV, HIS and 2R-G-B color spaces. The Guided Filtering method can enhance the new & old soil boundary effectively than any other methods such as Tarel, Multi-scale Retinex, Wavelet-based Retinex and Homomorphic Filtering, meanwhile, has the fastest processing speed of 0.113 s. The extracted soil boundary line of the improved anti-noise morphology algorithm has best precision and speed compared with other operators such as Sobel, Roberts, Prewitt and Log. After comparing different size of image template, the optimal template with the size of 140×260 pixels can meet high precision vision navigation while the course deviation angle is not more than 7.5°. The maximum tractor speed of the optimal template and global template are 51.41 km/h and 27.47 km/h respectively which can meet real-time vision navigation requirement of the smart tractor tillage operation in the field. The experimental vision navigation results demonstrated the feasibility of the autonomous vision navigation for tractor tillage operation in the field using the new & old soil boundary line extracted by the proposed improved anti-noise morphology algorithm which has broad application prospect.