Longitudinal Trajectory Tracking for UGVs on Agricultural Terrains

This paper presents the development of a small Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) for performing payload delivery tasks in agricultural terrains. Our robotic platform has been equipped with low-cost navigation sensors and onboard computers, used to operate a longitudinal trajectory tracking controller. Based on the nonlinear dynamics of such vehicles, a Backstepping controller with an integral part was developed to execute these tasks. Smooth longitudinal trajectories have been calculated to be tracked by the controllers in real-time experiments. We also present a comparative performance analysis of our controller with others of the literature within different scenarios.