Efficiency-Oriented MPC Algorithm for Path Tracking in Autonomous Agricultural Machinery

Path-tracking control algorithms in agriculture typically focus on how to improve the trajectory-tracking performance of autonomous agricultural machinery, and the agricultural productivity is optimized in a two-layer way. The upper operational layer optimizes an optimal tracking trajectory with the best agricultural productivity, and the lower control layer—such as Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC)—receives this optimized tracking trajectory first, and then steers the vehicle to track this trajectory with high accuracy. However, this two-layer structure cannot improve the agricultural productivity at the control layer online, which makes the agricultural operation sub-optimal. In this paper, we focus on agricultural machinery operational efficiency, to represent agricultural productivity; in order to realize optimizing control to further improve agricultural machinery operational efficiency, a new path-tracking control algorithm, named Efficiency-oriented Model Predictive Control (EfiMPC), is proposed. EfiMPC is intrinsically a nested structure, which can consider the global performance of the whole system defined in the operational layer—like the agricultural machinery operational efficiency considered in this paper—in the control layer online; thus, the agricultural machinery operational efficiency can be improved during the farming operation. An unreachable tracking point, denoted as the pseudo-point, has been proposed, to indicate the agricultural machinery operational efficiency objective in a receding horizon fashion; EfiMPC can utilize this pseudo-point to realize the optimizing control online. A simulation case study was used to test the superiority of the proposed EfiMPC algorithm, and the results show that, compared with the traditional NMPC algorithm, the agricultural machinery operational efficiency realized by EfiMPC was improved by 8.56%; thus, the effectiveness of the EfiMPC has been demonstrated.