Turning Control on a Slope Based on a Vehicle Posture for a Tracked Vehicle

<jats:p>Robots have been developed because it can provide many kind of support for human motion and work. Here, we focus on the use of robots in agriculture including orchards. We developed a crawler vehicle that can be stably run up slopes and over irregular ground. The crawler vehicle is a simple mechanism like those used in construction, and its running performance is very high. These vehicles can execute turns by revolving the left and right crawlers differently and with slip. Turning on a slope can cause slippage. However, making narrow turns is required in agriculture. The purpose of this study was to investigate how to prevent slippage in crawler vehicles when turning on a slope. We derived a vehicle model for driving speed ratio of the crawler vehicle turning radius, and the left and right crawlers in turning operations. As the result, we propose an approach to prevent a slipping by intervening in the input reference based on vehicle posture information. Finally, we demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method using a developed crawler vehicle.</jats:p>