The design of a mobile GPS-supported automated soil sampling machine

An automated soil sampling machine, sampling the soil from up to 30 cm depth into barcoded boxes and recording the data of the samples' location and boxes, is designed in this study. Automated soil sampling machine is installed on an 4x2 off-road vehicle. The machine is powered by two three-phase asynchroncus motors. These motors are controlled by electronic motor drive units. The first motor performs the movement on veritical axis. The second motor is used for spinning the auger which is used for sampling. Within the sequence of actions, the controls of each motor's movements are made by PLC both autameted and manual. There is a turntable stacking soil samples on horizontal axis. The sample soil, taken by the auger, is stacked into barcoded boxes on the tray. Accurate movement of tray is controlled by using stepper motor and electronic driver circuits. Barcode data of stacking boxes, turntable number, terrain data, soil sample's geographical location data are recorded into the SD card by means of a microcontroller. A touchscreen about 7 cm width is designed for transferring the machine's general situation data to the user and for data input, necessary for recording sampling process, by user. Two panels (user control panel and electric control panel) are installed on land vehicle. In total, 30 soil sampling studies were carried out on 1.2ha stable terrain by the designed machine. Soil samples were analysed and with the terrain data recorded into the machine, analysis results were mapped on ArcGIS 10.5 on stallite image. It can be seen that soil sampling process which is time consuming and tiring on wide fields, can be performed easily and in a shorter time period by the help of the designed machine.