Sichuan Machinery Group: Opening the “Silk” Road and “Customizing” Robots for Sericulture

Sichuan Machinery Group: Opening the “Silk” Road and “Customizing” Robots for Sericulture

“The hardest work in sericulture is picking mulberry leaves when the weather is hot, which accounts for the majority of human labor.” Not long ago, the Department of Economy and Information Technology formed a research team to conduct research on the development of the sericulture industry in the province. A special survey found that the most important problem in sericulture is insufficient mechanization.

SilkwormSilk is Sichuan’s traditional advantageous industry and people’s livelihood industry. The province’s mulberry garden area ranks second in the country, and the output of cocoons, silk and other major productsQuality remains at the forefront of the country, but the shortcomings of the industry’s development are also obvious: the degree of mechanization is obviously lagging behind, production efficiency is low, companies have difficulty recruiting workers, labor shortages, aging and other serious problems.

Understanding the problem is more important than solving it. After returning to Chengdu, the research team made inquiries in various ways, hoping to use industrial development ideas to solve the current problems faced by the sericulture industry.

It was learned that Sichuan Machinery Research and Design Institute (Group) Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Sichuan Machinery Group”) has developed a pepper picking robot, which may be transplanted to the field of mulberry leaf picking. On June 6, the special research team of the Department of Economy and Information Technology invited more than 30 experts from the mulberry industry chain to Sichuan Machinery Group for on-site observation and discussion, opening up the “silk” road and “customized” robots for mulberry leaf picking.

Give questions on site and provide suggestions for the development of mulberry picking robots

In the test workshop of Sichuan Machinery Group, a “Blue Pot Friend” became the protagonist of the visit. He was less than 1 meter tall, weighed 700 kilograms, and had arms up to 3 meters long. He was dressed in blue and had tracks on his feet. It looks like a mini excavator.

“This is the intelligent pepper picking robot we developed.” Liu Xueyin, deputy chief engineer of Sichuan Machinery Group, said that due to the irregular growth of pepper, prickles, small fruits, and harsh manual picking environment, it has affected the development of the pepper industry. develop. This robot has made breakthroughs in key technologies such as real-time target fruit recognition and positioning, robot deep learning algorithms, and robotic arm motion control. The prototype has been trialled in Zanthoxylum bungeanum bases in Mianning, Hanyuan, Wenchuan and other places. It is expected to be used in more advanced technologies after the technology matures. Promote application on a large scale.

The problem of Zanthoxylum bungeanum also exists in the sericulture industry. Jing Maoming, deputy director of the Department of Economy and Information Technology, introduced the problems discovered in the preliminary survey. There are relatively mature and available equipment in aspects such as sericulture, but picking, the most labor-intensive aspect, still has no good solution.

Can the technology of intelligent pepper picking robots be transplanted into the field of mulberry leaf picking? Is there any better solution? The research team came up with questions on the spot, and the experts had heated discussions and jointly made suggestions for customizing the “robot” for picking mulberry leaves.

A number of technical routes were put forward at the site, and several preliminary consensuses were reached: first, to establish a joint technology research platform between industry, academia, and research institutes to give full play to the advantages of experts in the entire industry chain; second, to create experimental fields starting from the collaboration of farmland, agronomy, and agricultural technology. , explore mulberry tree varieties and planting technologies suitable for mechanization, and lay a solid foundation for equipment research and development experiments.

Open the “Silk” road and use industrial thinking to promote agricultural development to improve quality and efficiency

In this seminar, Feng Daiwei, a professor at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, was one of the invited experts. He has been dealing with industrial robots and CNC machine tools for many years. He was very curious as to why the Department of Economy and Information Technology, as the competent industrial department, should maintain maintenance. Is the agricultural work of silkworms included in the research topic?

Silkworm silk is a traditional industry and a characteristic industry of Sichuan. Sichuan is the starting point of the Southern Silk Road. The ancient Shu people began to produce and use silk more than 3,000 years ago. “Today, the industry is still very competitive. Silk can not only be used to make clothes, but also silk protein and fiber materials…” Zheng Dan, deputy director of the Sichuan Silk Science Research Institute, said that the continuous shortage of sericulture labor will definitely To a certain extent, it limits the development of the sericulture industry.

To solve the production pain points of the sericulture industry is actually to solve the shortcomings of raw materials for industrial production.

Not only that, the sericulture industry is also a typical representative of the characteristic agricultural industry in Qiu District, Sichuan. The level of agricultural mechanization in Sichuan Province has always been limited by the hilly and mountainous topography, and its development level lags far behind that of domestic areas with developed agricultural mechanization. More than 70% of Sichuan’s mulberry orchards are planted on slopes, and mechanized picking of mulberry leaves is a difficult task. “Through the research and development of mulberry picking robots, it can mechanize andintelligentize economic agriculture in hilly areas /font>Exploring the path.” said Yi Wenyu, chief engineer of the Sichuan Agricultural Machinery Institute.