Modern commercial orchards are increasingly adopting trees of SNAP architectures (Simple, Narrow, Accessible, and Productive) as the fruits on such are, in general, more easily reachable by human or robotic harvesters. This article presents a methodology that utilizes three dimensional (3D) digitized computer models high-density pear cling-peach trees, fruit positions to quantify linear reachab...

The exploitation of nonlinear behavior in vibration-based energy harvesters has received much attention over the last decade. One key motivation is that the presence of nonlinearities can potentially increase the bandwidth over which the excitation is amplified and therefore the efficiency of the device. In the literature, references to resonating energy harvesters featuring nonlinear oscillato...

mills are able to accept chopped cane. In the past three years several locally developed whole stalk harvesters and imported chopper harvesters have come into use in many areas of the South African sugar industry. The Experiment Station therefore conducted time and motion studies during the past two seasons to assess the performance of these harvesters while operating under local field and crop...

Public demand for harvesting wild edible mushrooms has risen in recent decades and currently affects many forested areas around the world. The idea of introducing permits for users has been conceived as a tool for ecosystem management. The problem is that policy-makers lack the necessary means to help guide them when establishing prices for such harvesting permits. Valuing the recreational bene...

The continuous reduction in power consumption of wireless sensing electronics has led to immense research interests in vibration energy harvesting techniques for self-powered devices. Currently, most vibration-based energy harvesters are designed as linear resonators that only work efficiently with limited bandwidth near their resonant frequencies. Unfortunately, in the vast majority of practic...

The performance of more than 60 different electromagnetic energy harvesters described in more than 100 publications is benchmarked. The benchmarking is based on earlier published parameters from literature as well as on two novel parameters introduced in this paper. The former allow to compare different harvester conversion principles as well as harvesters of different electrodynamic design pri...

Most studies on spam thus far have focused on its content or source. These types of studies, however, reveal little about the behavioral characteristics of spammers. In addition, privacy issues may prevent wide access to email content. In this paper, we try to identify spammers by investigating their resource usage patterns. Specifically, we look at usage patterns of harvesters, the bots that a...

Living subjects (i.e., humans and animals) have abundant sources of energy in chemical, thermal, and mechanical forms. The use of these energies presents a viable way to overcome the battery capacity limitation that constrains the long-term operation of wearable/implantable devices. The intersection of novel materials and fabrication techniques offers boundless possibilities for the benefit of ...

Multi-source energy harvesters is a promising, robust alternative to power the future Internet of nano things (IoNT), since the network elements can maintain their operation regardless of the fact that one of its energy sources might be temporarily unavailable. Interestingly, and less explored, when the energy availability of the energy sources present large temporal variations, combining multi...

Energy harvesting has become a very popular research topic over the last 12 years, but has only made an industrial impact in a few areas, noticeably in process plant monitoring, including the water and petrochemical processing industries. Like most technologies, greater adoption needs to be realized if performance is to increase and cost to decrease. Batteries cost only tens of pence per Wh, an...