Design of obstacle avoidance controller for agricultural tractor based on ROS

The obstacle avoidance controller is a key autonomous component which involves the control of tractor system dynamics, such as the yaw lateral dynamics, the longitudinal dynamics, and nonlinear constraints including the speed and steering angles limits during the path-tracking process. To achieve the obstacle avoidance ability of control accuracy, an independent path re-planning controller is proposed based on ROS (Robot Operating System) nonlinear model prediction in this paper. In the design process, the obstacle avoidance function and an objective function are introduced. Based on these functions, the obstacle avoidance maneuvering performance is transformed into a nonlinear quadratic optimization problem with vehicle dynamic constraints. Moreover, the tractor dynamics maneuvering performance can be effectively adjusted through the proposed objective function. To validate the proposed algorithm, a ROS based tractor dynamics model and the SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) are established for numerical simulations under different speed. The maximum obstacle avoidance deviation in the simulation is 0.242 m at 10 m/s, and 0.416 m at 30 m/s. The front-wheel rotation angle and lateral velocity are within the constraint range during the whole tracking process. The numerical results show that the designed controller can achieve the tractor obstacle avoidance ability with good accuracy under different conditions.