EASS: An automatic steering system for agricultural wheeled vehicles using fuzzy control

Automatic steering is a crucial technology for achieving automatic navigation and unmanned driving of agricultural machinery. In this research, agricultural wheeled vehicles with the HPAS (Hydraulic Power Assistant Steering) system were selected as the research object and the EASS (Electric Automatic Steering System) was proposed by using fuzzy control to realize effective steering instead of human drivers. The PID (Proportional Integral Differential) algorithm was used to process the difference between the desired and actual steering angles and to realize automatic control of rotation of directional wheels. Fuzzy control was adopted to achieve self-adjusting of PID parameters and to optimize working state of the steering motor in real-time for different agricultural wheeled vehicles under various operating conditions. Fuzzy control rules were explored and formulated by analyzing variation of the steering angle under different resistive torque values. For evaluation of its feasibility, the newly developed EASS was applied in automatic navigation of a rice transplanter, a tractor, and a high-clearance sprayer. Field testing results showed that the maximum path tracking lateral error and heading error were 4.39 cm and 2.13°, respectively. And the maximum RMS (Root Mean Square) errors were 3.75 cm and 1.02°, respectively. Therefore, the fuzzy control-based the EASS in this research was applicable to various agricultural wheeled vehicles.