Straight-Line Control of Electric Chassis for Remote-Controlled Tobacco Leaf Harvesters

To address the issue where the harvesting machine fails to travel straight due to asynchronous rotational speeds of the drive motors on both sides of the chassis, caused by differences in road resistance, this study focused on the electric chassis of the tobacco leaf harvester and conducted research on its straight-line control. A symmetrically distributed dual-motor drive structure was selected as the power transmission method for the chassis. A mathematical model of the motors was established, and MATLAB Simulink was used to simulate and analyze the system’s dynamic performance under different control strategies for the single-side motor. Simulation results demonstrated that the fuzzy PID control strategy yielded superior system dynamic performance. On this basis, a simulation study on fuzzy PID-based dual-motor cross-coupled synchronization control was conducted, and the results verified the effectiveness of the cross-coupled synchronization control strategy. Subsequently, a system design was developed for remote control. The test results of straight-line driving performance were as follows. With the synchronous control strategy, the chassis travel deviation rate decreased from 4.32% (without the strategy) to 2.03%. The straight-line deviation was reduced, with significantly enhanced straight-line performance. The field inter-row travel test demonstrated that the chassis had a stable travel trajectory and exhibited good straight-line driving performance during field operations, which could meet the practical requirements for tobacco field operations.