Abstract:Aiming to address the challenge faced by sugarcane harvester operators who rely solely on visual judgment and experience to determine cane tops’positions, making it difficult to adjust cutting height accurately and in real-time, an intelligent positioning system for sugarcane harvester top cutters was proposed based on dual-modal and fuzzy adaptive PID control. Additionally, a cluster-based knife adjustment strategy was developed based on sugarcane cluster feature recognition. The system firstly utilized the YOLO v8 instance segmentation model to detect cane tops, with a depth camera capturing depth data of sugarcane tops in real time and converting pixel coordinates into camera coordinates for height measurement. To validate the depth camera’s field performance, multiple field experiments were conducted. Results showed that within a range of 50~100cm from the sugarcane, the average relative error of the depth camera ranged from 0.189% to 0.949%. Subsequently, fuzzy rules were designed, and a microcontroller integrated with a fuzzy adaptive PID algorithm was used to control the servo motor’s operating speed. The maximum rising response speed was approximately 289.36mm/s, and the descending response speed was about 273.16mm, with a measurement error within ±1mm. PID comparison experiments showed that fuzzy PID control, compared with traditional PID control, reduced the response time by 0.12s, bringing it down to 1.24s. The overshoot was decreased from 12.80mm to 4.63mm, the number of overshoots dropped to one, and the steady-state error stabilized within ±2mm. Finally, dynamic tests demonstrated that the system’s average recognition time was 0.08s, showcasing excellent real-time performance.