Abstract: Tree pruning can promote the accumulation of photosynthetic products, reduce the forest stand density, improve the utilization performance of air and light for stands, and promote the growth of trees, which is an important task for the forest maintenance. In recent years, the domestic pruning machinery research has made some achievements. However, the domestic and international high-altitude pruning machinery is still in its infancy at present. The operating height is generally less than 8 m, and the machine is difficult to improve the work efficiency of pruning high branches. Against to the current prevalence of pruning machinery at home and abroad, i.e. the high-degree lack of mechanical flexibility, which results in high labor intensity for operator and high operational risk, the mechanical structure of pruning high branches machine was designed (in theory tall tree pruning work within 15 m can be realized). By observing the relative position of the saw head and the branches, the operator can flexibly control the 3-arm coordinated movement to perform sawing and positioning using the human machine interface on the industrial plate pc (personal computer). In order to improve the ease use of the machine further, the wireless camera was designed to fix in front of the saw head to assist the ground operator to observe the high-altitude saw head and branch distance. The arm system is composed of 3 arms, which is fixed on the turntable of a lifting platform. Each arm is driven by one joint to rotate around the axis, and the pruning saw is fixed to the end of the third arm. The whole pruning height can reach 15 m, the pruning operating radius is up to 6 m, and the maximum pruning diameter can reach 10 cm, which meet the requirements of high altitude pruning operations. In this paper, the working principle of high-altitude pruning machine was described, and the pruning positioning was implemented by forward and inverse kinematics analysis of the manipulators. According to the mechanical structure of the pruning machine, the structural feature of the manipulator system was analyzed, and the mapping relation between the joint angle and the telescopic amount of the electric cylinder was obtained. The high-altitude pruning machine control system and integrated cutting positioning method were researched and developed. The control system of high-branch pruning machine based on touch-screen industrial flat plate was designed, and the control application based on Windows and MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) was adopted to realize the independent action or coordinated control of the 3 manipulators, the platform control, and the turntable control, which realized the positioning method of pruning machine. The open-area prototype pruning test was implemented, and the controller and control method were applied to the prototype test. In addition, through the prototype test, the error measurement and the error compensation in the open area were performed. The test results showed that the control system and the control method designed in this paper could realize the precise positioning of end-point pruning saw in the 2 coordinate axes of the space, of which the standard deviation was less than 5 mm. With the 15 m operating height, and the 6 m operating radius range of the pruning machine, it obtained a higher accuracy. So, it can meet the design requirements, and achieve precise positioning and pruning operations.