Backward path following control of an articulated vehicle

Recently, the need for autonomous or highly functional agricultural equipment has increased because of fewer and aging laborers involved in farming. Vehicles are used to pull trailers when picking fruits in an orchard. It has to be driven in reverse when being parked in a garage and when changing its course to prevent it from running into people or other such obstacles. However, precise control of its movement in reverse is very difficult for an unskilled driver. In this study, we propose a new backward path following control method for an unmanned ground vehicle with a trailer for operation in an orchard. The experiments confirmed the effectiveness of our proposed method.