Velocity Control of Unmanned Ground Vehicle Based on Gain-scheduled H_∞ Control

Abstract

High-accuracy velocity control is required for maintaining precision and efficiency in farm operations involving automated agricultural machinery. The velocity of agricultural machinery undergoes variation because of the disturbances on a farm. Moreover, during operations in the agricultural field, agricultural machinery is required to pull equipment or trailers. In this paper, a design method of velocity control based on gain-scheduled H_∞ control is proposed to deal with these disturbances and variations in weight. Furthermore, we implemented the proposed control law on an unmanned ground vehicle. The results of the experiments showed that the proposed method is effective in dealing with these disturbances and variations in weight, and thus, it can be applied to general mobile agricultural machinery.