As the main machinery of corn harvest, corn harvester directly affects the operational efficiency and the quality of harvest. In China, the key technology of corn harvest still needs to be broken through and the immature intelligence control technology has low practicability. Thus a design of intelligent control system was presented which was based on CAN-bus and this design would include the following aspects: according to the function of header loss control, seed damage control, grain separation loss control, automatic row-controlled and fault diagnosis，there were nine nodes set up in intelligence control system. The fundamental controller and the intelligent harvest controller were the core of intelligent control system, and intelligent harvest controller was based on the mechanism of harvest loss and multi-parameter joint control strategy to carry out intelligent control of corn harvester. According to the signal sent by the key board, handle, the angle sensor and the automatic row-controlled node, the fundamental controller controlled the manual operation, walking and steering. By analyzing the control signal and referring to SAE J1939, the protocol of application layer was formulated. Aiming at the key control technology of intelligent harvest, the corresponding control strategies were set up, which realized the multi-parameter adaptive joint control, the real-time data acquisition and display, deviation check and the fault diagnosis. The carrying and field experiments proved that control strategy of the system was effective and the system met the requirements of reliability and real-time, and also the strong practicability. The corn harvester had good performance, so it was an effective solution to collect data and control corn harvester.