Development and evaluation of a novel maize detasseling device

An essential task in maize seed production is the removal of male tassels from the maternal plants, thus ensuring the genetic purity of parental forms of hybrid maize. Hand detasseling is highly precise but labor-intensive and costly regarding human resources. Mechanical detasseling offers high efficiency in maize detasseling, but the high leaf damage rate significantly impacts plant performance and seed yield. With the passing of the rural labor force, there is an urgent need for higher precision and lower leaf damage rate detasseling devices to meet the market demand for maize detasseling. Therefore, a novel maize detasseling device was designed and developed in this paper to address these issues. First, a down-cut rotary detasseling method is proposed based on the phenotypic characteristics of maize plants and the principles of hand detasseling, effectively minimizing leaf damage near the maize tassel during the detasseling process. Second, the maize detasseling device was designed according to the detasseling method, which is compact in overall structure and consists of an RGB camera, claw-R device, claw-L device, sliding device, rotating device, etc. Eventually, a maize detasseling device was developed to conduct field detasseling experiments and evaluate the device's effectiveness. Experimental results demonstrate that the detasseling success accuracy, first-leaf damage rate, second-leaf damage rate, and third-leaf damage rate are 88.33 %, 81.13 %, 15.09 %, and 3.77 %, respectively. Furthermore, damage to only the first leaf or no damage to any maize leaf was considered correct successful detasseling. Therefore, the overall process final correct successful detasseling rate is 71.67 %, and the average detasseling time for a single maize is 11.85 s. This study provides the technical support for precise maize detasseling in maize detasseling devices.