Design and Experiment of an Unoccupied Control System for a Tracked Grain Vehicle

• Published in: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 24; no. 9; p. 2715
• Main Authors: Pan, Jiahui, Xu, Lizhang, Lu, En, Dai, Buwang, Chen, Tiaotiao, Sun, Weiming, Cui, Zhihong, Hu, Jinpeng
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 01.05.2024
• Subjects: Algorithms; automatic grain unloading; automatic navigation; Control systems; Controllers; Design; Efficiency; grain tank recognition; Hydraulics; Pneumatics; Portable computers; pure pursuit algorithms; Rice; tracked grain vehicle; Valves; Vehicles; China; tracked grain vehicle; automatic grain unloading; automatic navigation; grain tank recognition; pure pursuit algorithms
• ISSN: 1424-8220; 1424-8220
• DOI: 10.3390/s24092715

In order to enhance crop harvesting efficiency, an automatic-driving tracked grain vehicle system was designed. Based on the harvester chassis, we designed the mechanical structure of a tracked grain vehicle with a loading capacity of 4.5 m and a grain unloading hydraulic system. Using the BODAS hydraulic controller, we implemented the design of an electronic control system that combines the manual and automatic operation of the chassis walking mechanism and grain unloading mechanism. We utilized a hybrid A* algorithm to plan the traveling path of the tracked grain vehicle, and the path-tracking controller of the tracked grain vehicle was designed by combining fuzzy control and pure pursuit algorithms. Leveraging binocular vision technology and semantic segmentation technology, we designed an automatic grain unloading control system with functions of grain tank recognition and grain unloading regulation control. Finally, we conducted experiments on automatic grain unloading control and automatic navigation control in the field. The results showed that both the precision of the path-tracking control and the automatic unloading system meet the requirements for practical unoccupied operations of the tracked grain vehicle.