The Intelligent Row-Following Method and System for Corn Harvesters Driven by “Visual-Gateway” Collaboration

To address the issues of corn harvester field operations relying on driver visual guidance for row alignment, high labor intensity, and unstable operation accuracy, this study innovatively proposes a “vision-dominant, gateway-enhanced” dual-mode collaborative row-alignment assistance architecture, and independently develops the R2DC-Mask R-CNN instance segmentation network and MCC-KF robust filtering algorithm to form a deeply coupled hardware–software-assisted driving system. The R2DC-Mask R-CNN network is autonomously designed for corn row-detection scenarios, achieving accurate perception in complex field environments; the MCC-KF algorithm innovatively solves the state estimation divergence problem during transient vision failures through a multi-criteria constraint mechanism, ensuring continuous navigation capability; the intelligent gateway and vision system form a confidence-driven master–slave switching mechanism that adaptively enhances system robustness when vision is restricted. Field experiments demonstrate that within the speed range of 0.5–5.0 km/h, the average lateral deviation in the row alignment assisted by the system is 3.82–5.30 cm, the proportion of deviations less than 10 cm exceeds 96%, and all sample deviations remain within 20 cm; at a speed of 3.5 km/h, the system reduces the average grain loss rate from 3.76% under manual operation to 2.65%, a decrease of 29.5%. This system effectively improves row alignment accuracy and harvest quality, providing a practical human–machine collaborative solution for intelligent harvester operations.