Automatic reverse turn of agricultural vehicles: a predictive approach

International audienceThis paper addresses the automation of farm vehicle manoeuvres in headlands. A trajectory generation strategy is presented to plan reverse turns. Then, both steering and speed control algorithms are presented to guide the vehicle on the planned path, based on its kinematic model extended with additional sliding parameters and on predictive approaches. Real world experiments have been carried out on a low adherent terrain with an experimental mobile robot. At the end of each row, the sequences of the reverse turn are automatically generated to connect the next track to be followed, and the manoeuvre is autonomously performed by the vehicle. Reported experimental results demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed algorithms in full scale conditions