Control of a heavy material handling agricultural manipulator using μ-synthesis and robust gain scheduling

An experimental study is presented on control of a heavy material handling agricultural manipulator using robust control. The harvesting of heavy vegetables and organic compost fertilization requires hard manual labor. For heavy material handling, an agricultural robot was proposed in the first step. And then a control system using LQ control was designed and high-speed manipulation was realized in the second step. In this paper, we designed a control system to achieve robust performance in the presence of uncertainty. The robotic harvesting experiment was done in the watermelon field and the use of robust gain scheduling and μ-synthesis was confirmed.