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Industrial sustainability is attracting more and more attention in recent years. But sustainability data can be complex, hard to collect, and difficult to explain and use. We draw on visualisation research to improve the utility of sustainability-related information, which we categorise as normally being “invisible”. Better visualisation will facilitate practitioners to understand sustainability performance and eventually encourage better decisions to improve the sustainability performance of manufacturing industry. This research conducts a literature review through keywords searching. After filtering 319 results, we identified 28 papers as relevant ones and thematic analysis of the identified papers was conducted to understand their contents. The results of the literature review show that Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Sustainable Value Stream Mapping (Sus-VSM), Sankey diagram, etc., appear from the identified papers as visualisation tools or methods. We revealed two levels of visualisation on sustainability-related information, they are, assessment of sustainability and presentation of data, while the second level attracts less attention. Although some papers suggested that visualisation facilitates decision-making for improving sustainability performance, few studies paid attention to the effects of the visualisation. In the last, we also suggest dynamic visualisation as one of the potential developing directions for the visualisation of sustainability-related information, while the utility of creating such a dynamic system needs to be carefully analysed in advance.

The objective of this research was to develop an automatically guided rice transplanter by using RTK-GNSS and IMU as navigation sensors. The rice transplanter used in this research was commercially available and manually-operated. Automatic operation mechanisms were developed instead of manual functions including turning, stop, going forward and reverse. Sensor fusion was used to integrate measurements by sensors and calculate the absolute heading direction of the rice transplanter. A headland turning method was proposed to ensure the turning process in considering that a relatively large slip rate at extreme steering angles. Experiments were conducted to verify the performance of the automatically guided rice transplanter. Results showed that lateral and heading errors were less than 10 cm and 5 degrees, respectively, in terms of straight paths. And headland turns were automatically executed according to the desired pattern.

Based on full consideration of the working conditions in the filed, a monitoring system for precision planter was designed using the technology of sensor, single-chip Microcomputer and wireless transmission. In this system, photoelectric sensor and MSP430 were used to detect the performance of the seeder-metering device and process the data respectively. It mainly detected the miss index, multiple index, seeding amount, seeding rate, the plant spacing and other performance parameters. In the sound-light alarm system, a indicator light was used to show the fault type and location, then the detected data and fault can be displayed on the LED. In order to acquire and analyze the data at real-time, a wireless transmission system based on Bluetooth was designed. FS-BT485Abluetooth module was used to communicate with the host computer. To ensure the uniformity of drilling and sowing, a stepping motor was used to control the seeding rate in the laboratory. The results showed that reliability of the sound-light alarm system was 100% and the photoelectric sensor could detect more than 95% seeds passed it.

The seed-metering device of the no-tillage planter was driven by the ground wheel. Sliding was unavoidable when the ground was covered by the straw. High sliding brought seeding absence and affected the quality of sowing. In order to monitor the sliding of the ground wheel, a monitoring system composed of hardware and software was designed based on ATMEGA16 Microcomputer. In the system, the practical and the theoretical driving distance of the ground wheel were measured by the photoelectric sensor and rotary encoder respectively, then the sliding can be calculated and displayed on the LED. The system could achieve the data of sliding when the planter worked, and this could insure that the driver may recognize the working conditions at any moment. So it had very important significance which can improve the precision of sow.