Design and Experiment of Plate Taking Control System of Edible Sunflower (Edulis helianthus catino L.) Harvester

Abstract

This study aims at the problems of high labor intensity, high cost and high loss rate of mechanical picking of seeds, low mechanization level and difficulty to guarantee the quality of picking plates in the process of picking edible sunflower. Based on the principle of manual plate taking, a plate taking control system for a sunflower harvesting table was designed. The principle of taking the plate of the edible sunflower harvesting table was analyzed. According to the actual operation requirements, the overall scheme of the sunflower plate control system is determined, and the control strategy of imitating artificial low-loss harvesting is designed. To reduce the grain loss in the process of taking the plate and improve the control accuracy of the system on the movement speed and displacement of the key components in the process of taking the plate, a trapezoidal acceleration and deceleration control algorithm is designed as the control algorithm of taking the plate. The working performance of the plate control system was verified with the absolute error, relative error and total loss rate of the harvest as objectives. Bench and field verification experiments were both carried out. The bench experiment showed that the speed error of the plate parts was not more than 0.028 m/s. In the bench experiments of the device, the maximum positioning error was 1.25 mm, the average relative error was only 0.94% and the grain loss rate was not more than 2.26%. Its result showed that the system algorithm was reliable, the positioning accuracy was high and the plate taking operation can be completed well. The field verification experiment showed that the forward speed of the unit was in the range of 0.4~0.8 m/s, and the total loss rate of harvest was less than 5%. When the forward speed is 0.6 m/s, the minimum harvest loss rate is 2.32%, which indicated the control system meets the requirements of sunflower harvesting operation.