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Modern agriculture faces escalating challenges: increasing demand for food, labor shortages, and the urgent need to reduce environmental impact. Agricultural robotics has emerged as a promising response to these pressures, enabling the…
In this paper, we present a novel method to control a rigidly connected location on the vehicle, such as a point on the implement in case of agricultural tasks. Agricultural robots are transforming modern farming by enabling precise and…
This paper presents an offset-free model predictive controller for fast and accurate control of a spherical soft robotic arm. In this control scheme, a linear model is combined with an online disturbance estimation technique to…
Conventional linear crop layouts, optimised for tractors, hinder robotic navigation with tight turns, long travel distances, and perceptual aliasing. We propose a robot-centric square spiral layout with a central tramline, enabling simpler…
This paper proposes a new robust trajectory tracking error-based control approach for unmanned ground vehicles. A trajectory tracking error-based model is used to design a linear model predictive controller and its control action is…
Autonomous locomotion for mobile ground robots in unstructured environments such as waypoint navigation or flipper control requires a sufficiently accurate prediction of the robot-terrain interaction. Heuristics like occupancy grids or…
This paper presents a unified control framework for robust trajectory tracking and moving obstacle avoidance applicable to a broad class of mobile robots. By formulating a generalized kinematic transformation, we convert diverse vehicle…
The design of the path-following controller is crucial for reliable autonomous vehicle operation. This design problem is especially challenging for a general 2-trailer with a car-like tractor due to the vehicle's unstable joint-angle…
The physical coupling between robots has the potential to improve the capabilities of multi-robot systems in challenging manufacturing processes. However, the path tracking accuracy of physically coupled robots is not studied adequately,…
Autonomous navigation is the foundation of agricultural robots. This paper focuses on developing an advanced autonomous navigation system for a rover operating within row-based crops. A position-agnostic system is proposed to address the…
In recent years, advanced model-based and data-driven control methods are unlocking the potential of complex robotics systems, and we can expect this trend to continue at an exponential rate in the near future. However, ensuring safety with…
In recent years, the demand for customized, on-demand production has grown in the manufacturing sector. Additive Manufacturing (AM) has emerged as a promising technology to enhance customization capabilities, enabling greater flexibility,…
This paper proposes a new control strategy to improve vehicle cornering performance in a model predictive control framework. The most distinguishing feature of the proposed method is that the natural handling characteristics of the…
For many tasks, predictive path-following control can significantly improve the performance and robustness of autonomous robots over traditional trajectory tracking control. It does this by prioritizing closeness to the path over timed…
Networked control systems are closed-loop feedback control systems containing system components that may be distributed geographically in different locations and interconnected via a communication network such as the Internet. The quality…
The paper proposes a feed-forward control strategy for mobile robot control that accounts for a non-linear model of the vehicle with interaction between inputs and outputs. It is possible to include specific model uncertainties in the…
Robots must make and break contact with the environment to perform useful tasks, but planning and control through contact remains a formidable challenge. In this work, we achieve real-time contact-implicit model predictive control with a…
One of the most critical tasks in tractor operation is the accurate steering during field operations, e.g., accurate trajectory following during mechanical weeding or spraying, to avoid damaging the crop or planting when there is no crop…
Vision-based navigation systems in arable fields are an underexplored area in agricultural robot navigation. Vision systems deployed in arable fields face challenges such as fluctuating weed density, varying illumination levels, growth…
Continued adoption of agricultural robots postulates the farmer's trust in the reliability, robustness and safety of the new technology. This motivates our work on safety assurance of agricultural robots, particularly their ability to…