Design and Experiment of Multi-row Uniform Seeding Control System for Wide-row Wheat Seeder

Abstract:

To address the issue of uneven seeding rates across rows during curved operations of wheat seeders in rice stubble fields in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River agricultural zone, a multi-row uniform seeding control system was designed for wide-row wheat seeders. This system employed a multi-rate GNSS/IMU integrated navigation system to acquire the motion data of the seeder unit. Using the rigid body kinematics model, the ground speed of each seeding unit’s uniform seeder was calculated. The metering device’s drive motor speed was then controlled to meet the agronomic requirements of wide-row sowing. The STM32 microcontroller, combined with CAN communication and PID controllers, adjusted the seeding axis speed to achieve multi-row uniform seeding. Road experiment results indicated superior accuracy when the IMU sensor sampling rate was set at 20 Hz and the RTK-GNSS sampling rate was set at 10 Hz, with an average relative error of 4.18% in seeder ground velocity estimation and an average relative error of 11.26% in the angle between the velocity direction and the heading of the seeder, and the average coefficient of variation of seeding uniformity in each row of the system was 7.68%. Field experiment demonstrated that each row’s seeding quantity index in the multi-row uniform seeding control system for wide-row wheat seeder, under different driving paths, was consistently not less than 94.90%, with a coefficient of variation for each row not exceeding 0.97%. This system can meet the agronomic requirements for wheat wide-row seeding in the agricultural region of the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River.