2021

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Browsing 2021 by Author "Hamza Altaf Pirzada"

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    Design and fabrication of miniature autonomous farming tractor
    (UMT Lahore, 2021-06) Omer Butt; Hamza Altaf Pirzada; Junaid Ali Khan
    Pakistan is considered to be an agricultural country; agriculture holds most of its economy as a backbone. Of the 79.61 million hectors of land available to Pakistan, 50 % of it is cultivable but only 22.07 million hectors are cultivated however through the use of autonomous technology even with limited resources a farmer can utilize the land owned to its full potential. Additionally, with the advancement of autonomous technology and the integration of electric vehicles into the society the main concern is related to the emission of carbon dioxide produced through vehicle exhaust can be controlled to reduce the emissions further down. Pakistan is among the countries that are greatly affected by climate change. Therefore, by integrating towards electric autonomous vehicle Pakistan can reduce its emission gases significantly while providing the farmers with sustainable technology to help in labor man-hours reduction, maintenance of farms and provide a cost-effective solution to efficient farming. Furthermore, for this project the authors designed a autonomous tractor which can also be controlled using remote, identified the main components of autonomous driving, defined a path following controller for lateral and longitudinal vehicle control and tested the performance in Carla Simulator. To demonstrate the workability of the tractor, a production-built ATV (All Terrain Bike) was used as the frame of the design and with the gear motor to provide drive to the wheels of the tractor. For the implements used with the tractor for a farming a detachable mount was designed. A structural analysis was performed to find the stresses acting on the chassis from which a factor of safety was calculated. With this, the experimentation of the vehicle was commenced, in which tractor speed vs infrared (IR) object detection sensor performance was tested by moving the tractor at three different speeds and the performance of the IR sensor relative to the speed of the wheel was observed. A public survey was conducted from all groups of ages, in order to evaluate awareness about global warming, electrification, and autonomous tractors. The results obtained from the poll showed that the majority believed that autonomous tractors can outperform a human farmer with a significance of 61 % to 80 % while 24 % of the respondents believed that autonomous tractor can 81 % to 100 %out perform a human farmer.