Design and Experimental Validation of the Profiling Cutting Platform for Tea Harvesting

The low quality of mechanized tea harvesting in China’s hilly plantations, often caused by irregular canopy morphology, necessitates improved technology. This study addresses this issue by proposing a contact-based profiling mechanism and a corresponding control method for tea cutting platforms. This cutting platform mainly consists of a canopy profiling mechanism, a tea harvesting unit, a lifting actuator, and a control system, containing a mathematical model correlating the tea canopy pose with sensor signals. Following a theoretical analysis of key components of the profiling device, we determined their structural parameters. Subsequently, a profiling control strategy was formulated, and an automatic control system for the profiling cutting platform was developed. Finally, a prototype was constructed and subjected to experimental validation to assess the dynamic characteristics of its pose adjustment and its profiling-based harvesting performance. The results of this experiment illustrate that after implementing the profiling system, the proportion of time the cutting blade remained in an optimal cutting position increased from 26.5% to 95.0%, an improvement of 68.5%, demonstrating that the system successfully achieves its design objective of the adaptive profiling apparatus in response to variation in canopy morphology. In addition, the integrity rate of harvested tea leaves increased from 50.7% without profiling to 74.6% with profiling, an improvement of 47.1%, which indicates the good performance of this profiling cutting platform. Therefore, this research provides a valuable reference for the design of intelligent tea harvesting machinery for the hilly tea plantations in China.