Design and experimental study of bionic digging shovel based on vole’s front middle toe

To reduce the drag encountered by the potato harvester during excavation in wet soil, a bionic digging shovel was designed based on the vole's front middle toe. By using MATLAB software to extract and fit the information of the contour curve of the vole's front middle toe, the bionic digging shovel model was designed and established. A comparative experiment was conducted on the vole-imitating digging shovel, Gryllotalpa-imitating digging shovel, and common digging shovel in EDEM software, to verify that the vole-imitating digging shovel has drag reduction capability. Through single- and multi-factor simulation analysis, the structural and operational parameters of the vole-imitating digging shovel were optimized. The excavation drag of three types of shovels was compared through field experiments, and the correctness of the simulation results was verified. The results show that the optimal parameter combinations of the vole-imitating digging shovel, i.e., a single shovel width of 135 mm, an entry angle of 20°, and a forward speed of 0.5 m/s. Under the same working conditions, the vole-imitating digging shovel has a better drag reduction effect and a higher soil breakage efficiency than the other two shovels.