Dynamic-weighing grain mass flow sensing for reliable in-field yield monitoring in combine harvesters

Abstract

The accuracy of on-board yield monitoring for combine harvesters is limited by the difficulty of acquiring high-fidelity mass flow signals and achieving reliable cumulative integration under complex vibration and varying operating conditions. To address this challenge, this study developed a weighing-based on-board yield monitoring system (DW-ORMS), in which a flow-collecting weighing-type grain mass flow sensor (C-GMFS) served as the core sensing unit. The C-GMFS enables stable weighing observation in confined installation spaces through mechanical decoupling and a single force-transmission path. At the system level, a state-aware gating strategy and trusted update mechanism were introduced to improve the reliability of output and cumulative mass estimation during unsteady operating phases. Based on field-measured disturbance characteristics, a parameterized disturbance model was established and used to identify the valid operating window and fix the gating parameter range. Simulation results showed that the proposed method achieved band-limited interference suppression of A band ≥17.73 dB under strong disturbances while maintaining trend fidelity of PRR trend ≥41.73% and low processing delay. Field harvesting experiments were conducted at working speeds of 2–8 km·h − ¹. The cumulative strip mass showed excellent agreement with manual weighing references, with R ²=0.973 and RMSE = 0.84 kg, and the strip-level mass closure error remained within CE ≤ 5% (N = 35). No monotonic drift in error was observed across working-speed groups. These results demonstrate that the DW-ORMS provides a deployable and traceable solution for high-confidence on-board yield monitoring of combine harvesters under unsteady field conditions.

Plant phenotyping relevance

収量という植物由来の形質を対象に、動的秤量センサーと信号処理による圃場収量モニタリング手法を開発し、シミュレーションおよび実収穫データで検証しているため、方法が中心的である。

Code and data availability

The article describes a dynamic-weighing grain mass flow sensing system (DW-ORMS) with field validation data, but no public dataset, code, model, or repository is provided. The Data Availability Statement only offers raw data from the authors upon request, and no authors' public URL or deposit is present in the text.

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