Abstract

The aim of this study was to design automatic and accurate control systems for wheel speed and steering of an agricultural mobile robot. Three controllers, including lead-lag compensator, Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) and fuzzy logic controller were designed and simulated in this study to control the angular rate of the shaft of a DC motor actuator for a field survey mobile robot that moves between plants rows to perform image acquisition task through a digital camera mounted on a two link arm attached on the robot base. The response of the actuator model for each controller were determined and compared for a sinusoidal and a step input that simulated robot speed and positioning references respectively. Performance analysis showed the effectiveness of the PID and lead-lag compensator response for the wheel steering task, while the fuzzy logic controller design had a better performance in wheel speed control. The output of this analysis was a proved satisfaction of the proposed design criteria which results enhanced mobility of the robot in terms of fast response, speed control accuracy and smooth steering at row-end turnings.

Keywords:

Agricultural mobile robot, DC motor, fuzzy logic, PID, lead-lag compenstor,

References

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

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The authors have no competing interests.