An Adaptive Observer approach to Slip Estimation for Agricultural Tracked Vehicles

The paper deals with autonomous Unmanned Ground Vehicles developed for precision agriculture contexts. The focus of the paper is on the design of an adaptive observer for slip estimation ensuring exponential convergence to the real slip coefficients. Uniform global exponential stability of the origin of the error system is shown via Lyapunov analysis and persistency of excitation arguments. Furthermore, robustness to additive perturbations is shown in terms of Input-to-State Stability. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed estimator even in presence of noisy measurements.