A velocity control strategy for collision avoidance of autonomous agricultural vehicles

Collision avoidance ability is very important for autonomous agricultural vehicles, but the influence of different obstacles in agricultural environment is rarely taken into account. In this paper, a velocity control strategy for collision avoidance was proposed to adjust the velocity of autonomous agricultural vehicles according to the movement state and dangerous degree of the obstacles and the distance between the obstacles and the vehicles, thus to improve intelligence and safety of the vehicles. The control strategy involved two steps: collision prediction in dynamic environments with an improved obstacle space–time grid map, and velocity generator for collision avoidance with a cloud model. Simulations were conducted on the obstacle collision prediction and the designed cloud generator for velocity control respectively. Simulation results show that the proposed strategy can effectively predict collision with anti-disturbance ability for threat-free obstacles and rapid and accurate velocity output. And it realizes the real-time operation in dynamic environments with an average time of 0.2 s to predict collision. Additionally, field experiments including five trial schemes were performed to test the proposed velocity control strategy on an agricultural robot, where a haystack, a tractor and walking persons were regarded as static or dynamic obstacles. The results of the field experiments show that the proposed velocity control strategy has strong feasibility and effectiveness.