Abstract: Safflower is difficult to be harvested mechanically because of its growth characteristics in Xinjiang. Considering that the picking-mouth must be aligned with the flower-ball when harvesting, present technology has not fundamentally improved the efficiency of harvesting, which has increased the labor intensity to a certain extent. Meanwhile, the pattern of mechanized harvesting has not been promoted and applied due to the poor harvesting effect, high dropping rate and broken rate. In view of this, we proposed the picking head of comb-type safflower-filaments. This head could intermittently close and open by moving comb and fixing comb to clip filaments via the interaction of terminal face cam and the return spring. And finally, the clipped filaments were pulled down through the spindle rotation. Given that a single picking head was installed 3 sets of comb, safflower-filaments could be harvested 3 times in one rotation. The working stroke of terminal face-cam could be divided into 4 working strokes, including filaments grip segment, picking segment, collecting segment, and buffer running segment. By simulating the pulling action of the human hand to realize the extraction of the safflower, this device effectively solved the main issues in the process of mechanized harvesting of safflower, including low efficiency and severe broken safflower filaments. To further study the safflower picking device of comb-type and improve its working quality, we designed a test-bed of comb-type harvesting performance. Due to the irregular distribution of safflower flower balls, this test device only performed the picking test at a certain height. The test-bed was mainly composed of a comb-type picking head, power transmission system, frame and petals collect-box. The picking head was driven by electric motor. The experiment chose the safflower of "Yu Min stingless" as the test object. In order to further verify the rationality of the comb-type head design and improve its working performance, comb length, comb clearance and comb speed were considered as the influencing factors, and the collect rate, dropping rate and broken rate were taken as the response indicators. We carried out a test of quadratic rotation-orthogonal combination with 3 factors and 5 levels on the picking test-bed with comb type. Quadratic orthogonal rotary regressive experimental design was employed to develop the second order polynomial regression model, which explained the relationship between influencing factors and response indicators parameters. A mathematical model between response indicators and influencing factors was established by data optimization software Design-Expert 8.6.0. The influence of significant factors on the quality of operation was analyzed, and model parameters were optimized based on response surface methodology. The best combination parameters were as follows: the comb length was 39.71 mm; the comb speed was 78.68 r/min, and the comb clearance was 3.42 mm. In this condition, the collect rate, dropping rate and broken rate were 82.42%, 2.30% and 2.53%, respectively. When the comb length was 40 mm, the comb speed was 80 r/min, and the comb clearance was 3.5 mm, the repeated bench test results showed that the collect rate, dropping rate and broken rate were 82%, 2.29% and 2.45%, respectively. Because of the different distributed positions of safflower balls, it was necessary to arrange multiple picking heads in space according to distributed of balls, but most of the balls was distributed at the top. Therefore, this paper took the top safflowers as the test object for field experiment. The results of field experiment showed that the collect rate, dropping rate and broken rate were 81.88%, 2.25% and 2.43% under the same rounded optimization parameter combination, respectively. These results demonstrated that the comb-type head could perform well in the picking of safflower filaments. And it can offer a lot for improving the comb-type safflower picking device as well as the mechanized picking process for safflower.