Robust adaptive sliding mode control for path tracking of unmanned agricultural vehicles

•An agricultural vehicle dynamic-based model is developed by taking into account the internal forces, inertia and road bank angle.•Sliding mode observer (SMO) is designed for estimating the system state so as to adaptively adjust the uncertain bounds of cornering stiffness.•The proposed adaptive sliding mode control(ASMC) method not only guarantees strong robustness with respect to parameter uncertainties, disturbance and varying road conditions, but also requires no prior knowledge of the road information. In this paper, a novel adaptive sliding mode control (ASMC) for path tracking of unmanned agricultural vehicles is proposed. It is shown that the designed ASMC is capable of driving the closed-loop lateral position error dynamics to converge to zero asymptotically, where the sliding mode observer (SMO) is designed to estimate the system state so as to adaptively adjust the uncertain bounds of cornering stiffness. Compared with the classical sliding mode control technique, the proposed ASMC not only guarantees strong robustness with respect to parameter uncertainties, disturbance and varying road conditions, but also requires no prior knowledge of the road information. Simulation and experimental results from a typical agricultural wheeled vehicle are provided to verify the excellent performance of the proposed scheme. [Display omitted]