Abstract:
Conveying technology of agricultural materials has been one of the most important bottlenecks to restricting the intelligent application of farms. In general, the conveying equipment can be used to transport the materials from the feeder to the receiver. It is a high demand for the long battery life of the receiver for efficient and continuous conveying in the long distance. An automation conveying technology of agricultural materials can mainly cover all production links of farming, management, and harvesting in the complex system engineering. In this study, the current automation conveying technologies were systematically reviewed to divide into the following four categories, according to the material characteristics and conveying: automatic conveying technology of solid seedling fertilizer, liquid water medicine fuel automatic filling, harvest automatic collection, and harvest automatic unloading technology. A clear development trend was also proposed for the intelligent transportation of agricultural materials, with the development of technologies, such as 3S (Remote Sensing, Global Position System, GPS, and Geographic Information System, GIS), sensing and detection, as well as the automatic control and information processing. The final goal was to optimize the coordination of the fleet for the complete point-to-point zero inventory distribution, further realize the intelligent transportation of agricultural materials. Four stages of materials transportation usually included the meeting, docking, conveying, and separating. The main challenges were focused on the precise docking of the feeder/receiver, as well as the highly efficient, stable, and flexible conveying of materials. Furthermore, the research progress was summarized for three key technologies of intelligent material conveying, including autonomous positioning and navigation, real-time monitoring of material flow, and real-time communication of fleets. Among them, the autonomous positioning and navigation technology can be used to accurately control the position and path between the feeder/receiver, in order to ensure the precise meeting and docking of the feeder/receiver for better intelligent material transportation. The sensors can be widely used to real-time monitor the material balance in the granary of the feeder/receiver for the highly efficient, stable, and flexible transportation of materials in the real-time monitoring technologies of material flow. Technical support can also be provided to realize intelligent material transportation in the real-time communication technology of the machine group. The communication task between the feeder and the feeder can be completed by the transmission of information and data between the machine and the ground control station, all of which can then be collected, transmitted, and processed efficiently in real time. The information and data between the feeder/receiver can be used for a rapid response to the actual situation. Therefore, it is very necessary to combine the technical requirements and application scenarios of farm intelligence. The entire production can be linked to the agricultural material transportation system, including the farmland material demand decision-making technology using spatiotemporal data, the agricultural machinery material abundance prediction using the farmland digital model and variable operation prescriptions, and various material vehicles. A prediction was given for the trend of multi-machine collaborative material distribution in the intelligent farm operation, particularly from the perspective of dynamic optimization of machine distribution path. Therefore, the agricultural material conveying technology can be expected to be more intelligent, user-friendly, and precise in the future. Anyway, intelligent farms can greatly contribute to optimizing agricultural production and resource allocation in sustainable agriculture.