A Simplified Optimal Path Following Controller for an Agricultural Skid-Steering Robot

The dynamics of a skid-steering robot present intrinsic non-linearities that make the design and implementation of a controller a very complex task, time-consuming, and difficult to implement into an embedded system with limited resources. This paper presents a simplified first order digital model approximation and an optimal observer-based control approach for the tracking of the lateral position of such robots. In order to verify the validity of this proposal, 3D real-time interactive simulations and real validations with an agricultural skid-steering robot were performed with satisfactory results.