Abstract:To address the problems of high labor intensity, limited operating speed, and low efficiency in long-distance row-follow operation of traditional manually operated cotton pickers, based on the prior characteristics of parallel precision sowing of cotton using satellite navigation, an automatic row-follow control method of cotton picker based on parallel trajectory navigation was proposed. Firstly, the cotton picker was manually driven to complete the first row alignment operation, the RTK positioning trajectory data was recorded, and the linear fitting was carried out to obtain the slope of the reference navigation line. Then, when harvesting the subsequent rows, the cotton rows to be harvested were aligned at any starting point, and the parallel navigation baseline was calculated by the starting point coordinates and the reference slope. Finally, a speed-adaptive pure tracking algorithm was adopted to realize automatic row-follow control of the cotton picker. Field experiments demonstrated that this method could automatically align rows from the starting position of any row. At different speeds, the average absolute lateral deviation was 2.91cm, and the maximum absolute lateral deviation was 9.22cm, and the standard deviation was 1.80cm, which met the requirements of the alignment accuracy of cotton picker. Compared with the mechanical touch-based automatic row-follow methods, this method was not affected by missing or broken plants and maintained good alignment accuracy at high speed of 7km/h.