Sideslip angles observer for vehicle guidance in sliding conditions: application to agricultural path tracking tasks

Automatic devices dedicated to vehicle guidance in off-road conditions are necessarily confronted with sliding phenomenon, since it may considerably damage the accuracy of the following task. Control laws taking explicitly into account such a phenomenon have already been designed in previous work. They can actually improve the guidance accuracy. However their efficiency is highly dependent on the sliding parameters estimation (since these parameters cannot be provided by a direct measurement). In this paper, an observer-like estimator is designed, providing sideslip angles from a single exteroceptive sensor, namely a real time kinematic GPS (RTK-GPS). Improvements in guidance accuracy, with respect to previous estimation approaches, is demonstrated through full scale experiments, addressing agricultural applications