1st Workshop BOOK - project RHEA

Robotics and associated High technologies and Equipment for Agriculture
2.2 The innovative farming system
In the innovative system, three different machines, each 1.4 m wide, were used for
physical weed control: a rolling harrow, two flamers and a precision hoe.
2.3 Rolling harrow
The rolling harrow is equipped with specific tools (Fig. 3: spike discs placed at the
front, and cage rolls mounted in the rear. The front and rear tools are connected by
an overdrive with a ratio equal to 2. The disc and the rolls can be placed differently
on the axles: in close arrangement, in order to create a very shallow tillage (3-4 cm)
of the whole treated area (for seedbed preparation and non-selective weed control
after false seed bed) and in a spaced arrangement, in order to create efficient
selective post emergence weed control (for precision inter-row weeding) (Peruzzi,
2005 and 2006).
Fig. 3. The rolling harrow: close arrangement for full surface treatment (top);
spaced arrangement for inter row treatment (down)
2.4 Flaming machines
The mounted flamer (Fig. 4) is an open flame machine equipped with three LPG 50
cm wide rod burners. The machine has a “thermal exchanger”, which consists in a
hopper containing water heated by the exhaust gas of the tractor engine. Each
burner is placed on a wheeled articulated parallelogram in order to maintain the
correct distance from the soil surface. In the experimental field trials, the machine
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