Improving trajectory tracking performance of autonomous farming vehicles using adaptive extended state observer and finite-time technique

The ability of the autonomous farming vehicle to accurately and quickly track complex reference trajectories in the field is critical to crop yields and farmer incomes. The novelty of this paper is to design a new adaptive finite-time trajectory tracking control strategy with an adaptive extended state observer to improve the autonomous farming vehicle’s trajectory tracking accuracy and convergence speed in the complex farm operating environment. The adaptive extended state observer is constructed to deal with the slip disturbance and parameter uncertainty to improve the tracking accuracy. The finite-time control strategy is adopted to improve the convergence speed of the trajectory tracking of the autonomous farming vehicle. The effectiveness and advantages of the proposed control strategy are verified by comparing it with the active disturbance rejection control and traditional PID control strategies under MATLAB/Simulink environment.