Development of a row guidance system for an autonomous robot for white asparagus harvesting

The special cultivation features of white asparagus pose new challenges to the research and development of the row guidance control. This paper presents a row tracking system of a two-layer structure for an autonomous robot developed to harvest white asparagus. At the low level, two independent speed control loops are suggested to ensure the actual revolutions of the drive motors to follow their demanded values. A cascade control structure, consisting of an inner orientation error controller and an outer lateral offset controller, is proposed for the high level to drive the robot to track the desired trajectory. The most important advantage of the cascade structure is that the inner loop directly regulates the most significant error (the orientation error), which minimizes the impact of the external disturbances upon the outer loop. Moreover, the cascade scheme allows the orientation angle to be limited within a given range. That ensures a collision-free tracking. The controllers are designed based on the traditional proportional-integral-derivative (PID) algorithms. The control parameters are selected by using root locus analysis, which guarantees the system stability. The effectiveness of the proposed control regime is evaluated by numerical simulations and validated by experiments. The experimental results demonstrate that with the suggested row guidance strategy a satisfactory tracking accuracy of +/-0.5cm is achieved.