Design of Auxiliary Depth-control System for Micro-tiller

When the micro-tiller is applied to agricultural tillage on farmland in the hilly rural areas of southwestern China, there are two major issues. One is highly variable cutting depth; the other is the quite difficult manual labor. In order to improve the tillage quality of the micro-tiller and relieve the operator's manual labor, Auxiliary Depth-control System (ADS), which mainly consists of a detector, a controller, an actuator and a display interface, is designed in this paper. It is used to display real-time cutting depth and control the reciprocating motion of the resistance rod of the micro-tiller. The field tests showed that ADS improved the consistency of cutting depth because the coefficient of variation of the consistency of cutting depth decreased from 11.59% by the micro-tiller with traditional resistance rod to 5.82% by that with ADS, meeting the agronomic requirement of fewer than 10%. Meanwhile, the manual labor required was alleviated as labor intensity index decreased from 20 to 18 after usage of ADS in the micro-tiller. That could prove the significance of ADS in future micro-tiller design.