Evaluation of Cutting Stability of a Natural-Rubber-Tapping Robot
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
ABSTRACT
Remove these lines from the abstract “In Agriculture 4.0, robotics and automation will play an essential role. The Digital Revolution and the Information Age technology will be used to their full potential in agricultural production. Moreover, the introduction of advanced sensors helps to improve the robustness of open-loop robotic systems in unstable environmental conditions.” The abstract must be concise and summarize the problem, the methods, results and major findings.
Is this a result “The performance of the system, especially the cutting stability, still needs to be improved?” Or a justification for why you are doing this work?
This is vague “explore the cutting principle”. You explain the goal of the paper in the next sentences, which should come much earlier.
Re-write the abstract to reflect the above comments.
Lines 100-110: How are these related to your study? And where do you perform data fusion in this work? Aligning the data based on the timestamps is not fusion.
Lines 117-123: The authors state that the paper brings two contributions. The first is real-time recording of the blade accelerations, where measurements taken with different system clocks were synchronized. The second is “the principle of how impact acceleration affected the physical properties of the chips was explored. The relationship between acceleration and position change was established”. The first cannot be considered as a contribution, since such data pre-processing and alignment are standard when experimental data are acquired. The authors should simply describe the method – as they already do – in the Materials and Methods section, and remove it from the contributions. The second statement is not clear and must be clarified. Also, don’t your results depend on the shape of the cutting tool? How do they generalize?
Lines 134-142. These “three types of movements”, are they specific to the commercial robot you used? In general, robot arms perform all kinds of motions under position control.
Lines 143-147. The robot is under position control. Wouldn’t it make sense to have force control?
In section 3.1., Eq. 2 is confusing. What are the three acceleration values in X,Y Z? Later, you discuss aligning accelerations to the interpolation points, normalizing accelerations, and present figures 9-11 with ‘statistics’ of accelerations. You also say, “a linear fit was made to the variation of accelerations over the three measurement axes”. One cannot understand what values you use for eq. 2, i.e., how Table 3 is derived. Are they averages over all 21 interpolation points? Explain clearly.
In Section 3.3., did you perform regression analysis using the values in Table 3? What thickness values did you use, since they varied over the 10 repetitions?
What is Fig. 12? What does it mean? I suspect that your initial contribution statement “The relationship between acceleration and position change was established,” refers to the acceleration variation in the 21 interpolation points, but I cannot understand if it is the case, and why is it important. The text is overall very confusing.
Section 4.1. What kind of sensor fusion did you do? There was only one sensor, and you used accelerations. You write, “By combining the acceleration variations on the three axes (see Figure 9-Figure 11 and Table 3), the preliminary conclusion can be obtained that these accelerations vary independently.” This is not “fusion”.
Overall, your results depend on the cutting blade’s geometry and material. How do they generalize, and is the regression helpful in other cutting configurations?
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
In this paper, to realize the mechanization and automation of rubber tapping, sensor fusion technology was used to explore the cutting principle. A Bluetooth-based wireless inertial measurement unit (IMU) was introduced to assist the six-degree of freedom (6-DOF) robotic arm in measuring the accelerations and positions of the blade during the cutting process. The research results can provide theoretical support and operational reference for the subsequent improvement of end-effector and motion control work. The modification comments are as follows:
1. The abstract needs further improvement.
2. In the introduction, the second paragraph does not serve as a link between the preceding and the following and is somewhat redundant. In addition, Figure 1 is of little significance in the introduction. It is suggested that the author delete Figure 1 and modify the second paragraph.
3. Please mark the IMU in Figure 5 for better understanding.
4. Please explain the results of Figure 8 to make it meaningful.
5. Please analyze the cause of the abnormality of the fourth curve in Figure 12 in detail.
6. In the materials and methods, the cutting operation includes seven stages, but the author did not describe these seven stages in detail. Please ask the author to describe them in detail. At the same time, during the rubber tapping operation, only the starting point is detected, and the end point is not detected. It is applicable to rubber trees that have been pre-tested but not to trees that have not been pre-tested. In addition, the natural rubber tree is anisotropic, and the rubber tapping operation described by the author is not universally applicable.
7. In the materials and methods, the author only uses the bark consumption as the test influencing factor, but in the tapping operation, the cutting depth is also an extremely important test influencing factor. The author is asked to supplement the tapping-related tests with different cutting depths and different bark consumptions.
8. The author is requested to clearly indicate the evaluation index of cutting stability in the paper. At the same time, evaluating cutting stability solely by chip thickness is not convincing. In addition, evaluation indexes of cutting stability include cutting depth, cutting surface smoothness, etc., but the author does not consider these evaluation indexes.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
My comments were adequately addressed. The text needs some more editing for English.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
1. The author expounds that the tapping robot aims to complete the detection of the starting point of the tapping line, and the end point can be calculated according to the starting point. Please describe in detail the process of calculating the end point according to the starting point.
2. Please supplement the relevant experiments on the cutting stability of the rubber tapping robot under different cutting depths.
3. The author explained that in another study, the relevant experiments on the change of cutting force under different cutting depths were carried out. Please supplement this part of the experiment.
4. The author states that the selection of chip thickness as the index for evaluating cutting stability has been carefully considered. Please carefully elaborate and analyze the reasons for selecting chip thickness as the evaluation of cutting stability and the reasons for not selecting cutting depth and cutting surface smoothness as the evaluation of cutting stability.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
