Lockheed Martin Corporation

Sperry Corporation

Unisys Corporation

Loral Corporation

David P Andersen

George F Nelson

Michael Farmer

Gerald F Sauter

Steven Allen Murphy

Raymond C Hedin

John F Siebenand

Dennis W Paulinski

Eugene P Chicoine

A device to measure the volume and weight of a harvested grain crop during the harvesting of the grain crop with a weight measurement member including an elevator for moving grain from a lower elevation to a higher elevation with the elevator having a rotatable belt and a set of paddles thereon for moving grain from the lower elevation to the higher elevation with a torque sensor to determine the increase in torque on the shaft as a result of having to raise the kernels of grain from the lower elevation to the higher elevation and an acoustic volume measurement member to obtain information on the depth of the grain that is correlatable to volume of the harvested crop.

Acoustic volume and torque weight sensor

A device to measure the volume and weight of a harvested grain crop during the harvesting of the grain crop with a weight measurement member including an elevator for moving grain from a lower elevation to a higher elevation with the elevator having a rotatable belt and a set of paddies thereon for moving grain from the lower elevation to the higher elevation with a torque sensor to determine the increase in torque on the shaft as a result of having to raise the kernels of grain from the lower elevation to the higher elevation and an acoustic volume measurement member to obtain information on the depth of the grain that is correlatable to volume of the harvested crop.

A method and apparatus for guiding an agricultural implement having transversely extending arms by spraying the ground with a band of a fluorescent chemical from an end of one of the extending arms of the agricultural implement to mark the end of the area covered by a first pass of the agricultural implement, directing an optical beam having a width substantially greater than the band of fluorescent chemical onto the band of fluorescent chemical to fluoresce a portion of the band of fluorescent chemical which produces a fluoresced region on the band of fluorescent chemical, and positioning a detector on the band of fluorescent chemicals to detect the fluoresced region on the band of fluorescent chemical to determine the position of the implement with respect to the fluoresced region and thereby maintain the implement on course.

Dye marker for agricultural row guidance

A combine or harvesting machine has a header on its front end which is moved into a crop swath when harvesting the crop. The swath width of the crop in front of the header is measured with two acoustic range sensors that are mounted on opposite ends of the header in a horizontal plane so they face each other. The data that is received may be utilized either to determine crop yield or to control an automatic steering control, or both.

Crop swath-width measurement using acoustic transducers

A radar pulse detection and classification system receives times-of-arrival of pulses from simultaneous emitters over a wide range of pulse repetition frequencies (PRF's). The pulses are deinterleaved into bands of pulse repetition intervals (PRI's) so that a fixed number of pulses are required for detection of an emitter regardless of the PRI of the emitter. The pulse periodicities of the pulses in a pulse stream are determined by autocorrelation, and candidate emitter PRI's are selected from the pulse periodicities which were determined by autocorrelation. The pulses of candidate emitters are time-integrated to obtain time-integrated signals, and emitters are detected from peaks in the time-integrated signals. The time-continuity of said pulses are measured to determine emitter existence. The system receives pulses from both jittered and non-jittered emitters. It estimates jitter width in a pulse stream by utilizing peak pulse widths found by autocorrelation and removes jittered emitters from a pulse stream by predicting their times of arrival from the known PRI phase and jitter estimated for a previous pulse stream.

Radar pulse detection and classification system

A broken tine detector for agricultural machines is provided for machines such as balers and forage harvesters. The tines form a first plate of a capacitor which rotates about the axis of a reel. The second plate of the capacitor may be provided by a back-plate which is located at the front of an agricultural machine adjacent to the ends of the tines and which is connected to machine ground. An alternate embodiment of the invention is devised by utilizing conductive strips on a tine guard. Each of the conductive strips may be utilized to form the second plate of the capacitor. The row of tines pass through individual slots in the tine guard so that a particular row in which the tine is broken may be detected. When a tine is broken the total capacitance between the tines and the back-plate will change and will be detected, and an indication will be supplied to an operator so that the operator may stop the machine and remove the tines.

Broken tine detector for agricultural machines

A sine wave oscillator provides an input signal to a step-recovery diode (SRD). The SRD produces a wideband series of harmonics of the frequency of the sine wave oscillator that are represented as 'lines' in a power r.f. frequency plot. The output of the SRD is supplied to one or more bandpass filters or lowpass filters which provide selection windows so that only a specified number of harmonic lines are passed within a selection window. These specified harmonic lines are then coupled to one or more high speed input switches which are coupled to one or more high speed selection switches. The high speed selection switches are each coupled to a separate bandpass filter that is tuned to a different bandpass frequency range. Each bandpass filter corresponds to one or to several adjacent lines of the selection windows. The selection switches are connected so that various ones of them may be turned on to form either selective parallel or serial combinations, or even simultaneous parallel/serial compositions, of the frequency line components under the control of a digital switch controller. The output of the bandpass channel filters are coupled to a broadband output r.f. amplifier so chat transmission of the desired output signal may be made from the amplifier either over a wire or by wireless transmission. An amplitude level controller for limiting the amplitudes of selected frequency lines and a phase modulator for phase-modulating the output frequency line components are optional features.

Comb data generation

An analog speech signal is sampled of a nominal rate of 6 kilohertz and digitized in a Mu-Law Encoder. The digital output of the Mu-Law Encoder is converted by a microprocessor performing table look-up to linearized pulse code modulation (PCM) samples nominally of eight bits per sample. Using a BSPCM (Block Scaled Pulse Code Modulation) method, in each block of nominally 246 eight-bit PCM samples (representing approximately 41 milliseconds), the maximum and minimum sample values are found and used to calculate a scale factor equal to the maximum sample value minus the minimum sample value, with the difference being then divided by a constant number nominally equaling 16. Then the BSPCM samples are generated from the PCM samples each as a corresponding one PCM sample minus the minimum PCM sample value, the difference being then divided by the scale factor. In effect, the bit rate is reduced by adjusting the step size to follow the local block dynamic range. The BSPCM samples so created are susceptible to signal processing operations like as to PCM samples. When the BSPCM encoded words plus the minimum, PCM encoded, sample plus the range increment scale factor are stored as a data block, then such data block can, at a later time, be decoded, or reconstituted, into linear PCM data. A silence interval is encoded as zero amplitude using run length coding of the number of blocks. Such digital PCM data can be converted to an analog audio signal for voice output across a telephone system.

Speech sampling and companding device

A ground-to-air, voiced alerting system whereby a ground controller can communicate traffic warning messages to a pilot in an automatic fashion via a voice radio band and a voiced message generator. The system generally comprising means for transmitting a frequency shift key (FSK) encoded message to the pilot via the voice band and receiver means for decoding the same message. The decoding means, in turn, generally comprising means for identifying specific aircraft and additional means for decoding the message and producing the voiced message over the pilot's head set.

Growing community of inventors

Burnsville, MN, United States of America

David P Andersen