Trajectory Tracking of a Ground Agricultural Robot Using Sliding Mode Control

The world's food security and safety are of great concern to the research community due to the danger posed by the growing human population, climate change and other challenges. Precision agriculture optimizes food production in farmlands by efficiently utilizing available farm inputs. Agricultural robotics is one of the key methods that are used in achieving precision agriculture. The utilization of robots to carry out farm activities requires a robust control approach that would ensure accurate trajectories are followed for fertilizer and pesticide application; harvesting, cultivating and other applications. Thus, this paper presents a sliding mode control (SMC) for the tracking of three different trajectories that could be used to achieve any agricultural task. The work presents performance analysis of essential trajectories since they are required for the execution of agricultural tasks to fully robotize the agricultural sector. The obtained results demonstrate that SMC provides an excellent tracking performance on each of the examined trajectories.