Towards agrobots: Identification of the yaw dynamics and trajectory tracking of an autonomous tractor

•Modelling the yaw dynamics of an autonomous tractor.•The NLS frequency domain identification is used to obtain the model parameters.•An MPC controller for the yaw dynamics.•A kinematic controller for trajectory tracking.

More efficient agricultural machinery is needed as agricultural areas become more limited and energy and labor costs increase. To increase their efficiency, trajectory tracking problem of an autonomous tractor, as an agricultural production machine, has been investigated in this study. As a widely used model-based approach, model predictive control is preferred in this paper to control the yaw dynamics of the tractor which can deal with the constraints on the states and the actuators in a system. The yaw dynamics is identified by using nonlinear least squares frequency domain system identification. The speed is controlled by a proportional–integral–derivative controller and a kinematic trajectory controller is used to calculate the desired speed and the desired yaw rate signals for the subsystems in order to minimize the tracking errors in both the longitudinal and transversal directions. The experimental results show the accuracy and the efficiency of the proposed control scheme in which the euclidean error is below 40 cm for time-based straight line trajectories and 60 cm for time-based curved line trajectories, respectively.