An Automatic Excavation Depth Control System for Semi-Feeding Four-Row Peanut Combine Harvester

In the process of peanut mechanical harvesting, reasonable and consistent excavation depth is an important prerequisite to ensure the quality of harvesting. At present, the excavation depth of semi-feeding four-row peanut combine harvester is mainly adjusted manually during harvesting with poor accuracy and slow response, which apparently fails to lower the leakage rate and breakage rate of peanuts in the harvest operation. To solve the problem, this paper designs an automatic excavation depth control system for the semi-feeding four-row peanut combine harvester based on a STM32 micro-controller and rotary encoders, which is simple but efficient. The control device for excavation depth developed in this paper is introduced while the structure and principle of the proposed automatic control system is described along with the methods of hardware and software design. The experiment shows that the system runs stably and reliably which can control the excavation depth automatically and precisely in real time during the peanut harvesting. It is of great significance to improve the harvest quality of semi-feeding four-row peanut combine harvester.