Motion planner and lateral-longitudinal controllers for autonomous maneuvers of a farm vehicle in headland

This paper addresses the problem of path generation and motion control for the autonomous maneuvers of a farm vehicle in headland. A reverse turn planner is firstly investigated, based on primitives connected together to easily generate the reference motion. Then, both steering and speed control algorithms are presented to accurately guide the vehicle. They are based on a kinematic model extended with additional sliding parameters and on model predictive control 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 reverse turn is automatically generated to connect the next reference track, and the maneuver is autonomously performed by the vehicle. Reported experiments demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed algorithms.