Model Predictive Control for Vehicle Guidance in Presence of Sliding: Application to Farm Vehicles Path Tracking

International audienceOne of the major current developments in agricultural machinery aims at providing farm vehicles with automatic guidance capabilities. With respect to standard mobile robots applications, two additional difficulties have to be addressed: firstly, since farm vehicles operate on fields, sliding phenomena inevitably occurs. Secondly, due to large inertia of these vehicles, small delays introduced by low-level actuators may have noticeable effects. These two phenomena may lower considerably the accuracy of path following control laws. In this paper, a vehicle extended kinematic model is first built in order to account for sliding phenomena. These latter effects are then taken into account within guidance laws, relying upon nonlinear control techniques. Finally, a Model Predictive Control strategy is developed to reduce the effects induced by actuation delays and vehicle large inertia. Capabilities of this control scheme is demonstrated via full scale experiments carried out with a farm tractor, whose realtime localization is achieved relying uniquely upon a RTK GPS sensor