A semi-autonomous tractor in an intelligent master–slave vehicle system

This paper presents an approach to develop an intelligent master–slave system between agricultural vehicles, which will enable a semi-autonomous agricultural vehicle (slave) to follow a leading tractor (master) with a given lateral and longitudinal offset. In our study not only the follow-up motions but also the site-specific control of the apparatus such as rear and front power lift was considered. In the first part of this paper, the recent research works in the area autonomous farming were discussed and the restrictions of these research works were illustrated. In the second part an approach, to construct a master–slave system between two agricultural vehicles was demonstrated. In the next part, the mathematic modeling of this master–slave system and the simulation results about the control algorithm were demonstrated. Afterwards, the result of a real field test was presented and the safety considerations about such an intelligent vehicle system were made.