Sweet potato is China’s fifth largest staple crop, yet its mechanized harvesting level has long been low, severely constraining industrial development. This paper reviews mechanized sweet potato harvesting technology, covering industrial status, core devices, equipment characteristics, and challenges. Cultivation exhibits a three-region pattern—northern starch-type, southern fresh-market, and the middle-lower Yangtze—with marked differences in ridge spacing (800–1200 mm), soil types (sand to clay), and plastic mulching. Current general-purpose harvesters lack regional adaptability. Technically, vine handling is hindered by intertwined vines and fibrous roots, creating trade-offs between stubble height and collection; digging shovels are evolving towards bionic drag reduction, but quantitative relationships among soil, shovel geometry, and tuber damage remain theoretically unsupported; elevator-chain soil−tuber separators dominate, yet the trade-off between efficiency and tuber integrity is especially acute in clay soils. In intelligence, domestic mass-produced machines are mostly mechanical, with electro-hydraulic depth control, vision-based row following, and blockage monitoring largely at prototype stages. Industrially, segmented harvesting still prevails, combined harvester adoption lags behind developed countries, and R&D investment and extension services are insufficient. This paper proposes region-specific equipment development, low-damage separation, phased introduction of intelligent technologies, and strengthened policy coordination, aiming to provide a reference for sweet potato harvester R&D.
Zhang et al. (Sun,) studied this question.
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