SEMI-PHYSICAL SIMULATION RESEARCH ON THE CONTROL SYSTEM OF COMBINE HARVESTER CUTTING TABLE

To address challenges in developing the rice-wheat harvester cutting platform controller—such as sensitivity to working conditions, long development cycles, and cumbersome performance testing—a semi-physical simulation platform is designed. Based on the functional requirements of the cutting platform, Simulink is used to build a mathematical model of the controller and its I/O hardware model. A hardware-in-the-loop simulation test platform is developed using the TC377ECU controller. By integrating the Whale Optimization PID algorithm, overshoot is reduced by 3.5%, and rise time improves by 0.303 s compared to conventional PID. Testing in both simulation and real environments shows a maximum absolute error of 10.58 mm for cutting height and a correlation coefficient of 0.9474. The rotational speed errors for the reel and auger have expectations of 0.106 rpm and 0.101 rpm, with standard deviations of 0.165 rpm and 0.172 rpm. This validates the controller’s feasibility, shortens development time, and lowers costs.