Research on Assisted Driving Method for Cotton Pickers Based on RTK-GPS

In the large-area cotton picking operation, the traditional manual operation mode faces the problems of high labor intensity, slow operation speed and low efficiency. In order to solve these problems, this study proposes an automatic alignment method of cotton picker based on RTK-GPS trajectory navigation technology. This method first completes the alignment of the first row by manual operation, and then uses the segmented median filtering technology to record the trajectory data of RTK-GPS, and determines the slope of the reference navigation line by linear fitting these data. In the subsequent picking process, the cotton picker can automatically align with the target line from any starting point. This process depends on the initial coordinates and the determined reference line slope to calculate the parallel navigation baseline. Automatic alignment is realized by a speed adaptive pure tracking path algorithm. The field test results show that this method can realize the automatic line alignment from any starting position, and the system performance is superior to the traditional manual alignment mode in many aspects, which meets the requirements of the alignment accuracy of the cotton picker.