The South African sugar industry moves 74% of the annual crop by road transport. As fuel prices continue to rise there is therefore a need to investigate the effects of load size and tractor size on the fuel consumption and the productivity of transport units. Tests have been carried out to evaluate the effects of these parameters for the tractor sizes most common in the sugar industry. Results...

In this paper, a predictor is developed in order to estimate roll angle and lateral acceleration for tractor-semitrailers. Based on this prediction, an active control system is designed to prevent rollover for these vehicles. In order to develop this control structure, a high order recurrent neural network is used to model the unknown tractor semitrailer system; a learning law is obtained using...

Roll dynamics in heavy freight vehicles is characterized in driving conditions by the lateral load transfer coe  cient. The coe  cient tracking requires sophisticated measurement systems for assessing the wheels’ normal loading. In this paper a new recursive non-linear lateral load transfer estimator employing sensors that are already used on a vehicle in combination with additional units tha...

CVETANOVIC, B. and D. ZLATKOVIC, 2013. Evaluation of whole-body vibration risk in agricultural tractor drivers. Bulg. J. Agric. Sci., 19: 1155-1160 During their work, agricultural tractor drivers are exposed to various negative influences, among which vibrations are especially harmful. It is about vibrations generated in engine while the tractor is working, which are then transmitted to the dri...

Tractor is a system for understanding English messages within the context of hard and soft information fusion for situation assessment. Tractor processes a message through text processors using standard natural language processing techniques, and represents the result in a formal knowledge representation language. The result is a hybrid syntactic-semantic knowledge base that is mostly syntactic...

In this paper, sliding mode controllers (SMC) are designed for a steerable tractor-trailer system, which is operating in the presence of longitudinal and lateral slips at front and rear wheels. Such vehicles intended for autonomous operations usually traverse at low speeds along straight lines. As very low accelerations are involved kinematic models seem sufficiently accurate for developing con...

Five hundred and seventy one matches in the Australian Football League [AFL] had ground hardness measured using a Penetrometer, over the period 1997-2000. The method used was 3 drops at each of 20 locations over the playing field on the morning before games. Anterior Cruciate Ligament [ACL] injuries were recorded using an ongoing injury surveillance system. There was a non-significant trend tow...

Abstract The increase in population day-by-day causes a direct and indirect effect on country’s pollution resources. These have adverse effects the environment contributes directly to climate change. A transition from an internal combustion engine electric vehicle is vital, since with lot of motor battery technology available globally. This paper focuses different types motors batteries that ca...

So called automatic guidance systems are becoming more common in agricultural tractors, so that a driver does not need to steer the vehicle. The systems are mostly relying on GPS with correction. However, these systems usually steer only the tractor itself, despite the fact that the implement is the one that has to be run side by side with the previous swath. With towed implements, or trailers,...

Original scientific paper The slip, the resistance to rolling and pulling force are interconnected. The influence of tyre wear on the tractor pulling force and slip on three different grounds was observed. The tangential force was measured by dynamometers fixed to tractor driving half-axle. The pulling force on the pulling rods was measured by dynamometer fixed to the pulling force. The tractor...