Development and Testing of Automatic Row Alignment System for Corn Harvesters

Corn harvester row alignment is a critical factor to improve harvesting quality and reduce cob drop loss. In this paper, a corn harvester automatic row alignment system is designed with a self-propelled corn combine harvester, incorporating a front-end touch row alignment mechanism of the cutting table and a harvester steering control system. Corn stalk lateral deviation from the reference row during harvesting is detected by a front-end touch-row alignment mechanism that serves as an input to the automatic alignment system. The harvester steering control system consists of Hirschmann PLC controller, electric steering wheel, steering wheel deflection angle detection device, display module and mode selection module, etc. The adaptive fuzzy PID control algorithm is used to determine the desired turning angle of the harvester steering wheel by combining with the harvester kinematic model, and the model is simulated and analyzed by Matlab/Simulink software. The automatic row alignment system was mounted on a 4LZ-8 self-propelled corn harvester for field tests, and the test results showed that the average percentage of deviation of corn stalks from the center of the row alignment cutting path within ±15 cm during the automatic row alignment process was 95.4% at harvester speeds ranging from 0 to 4.6 km/h, which could meet the requirements of the corn harvester for row alignment harvesting. The test results meet the requirements of the corn harvester for row alignment and serve as a benchmark for the research on automatic row alignment of corn harvesters.