Abstract
Automatic guidance of farm tractors would improve productivity by reducing operator fatigue and increasing machine performance. To control tractors within $\pm$5cm of the desired path, fuzzy and adaptive steering controllers were developed to evaluate their characteristics and performance. Two input variables were position and yaw errors, and a steering command was fed to tractor model as controller output. Trapezoidal membership functions were used in the fuzzy controller, and a minimum-variance adaptive controller was implemented into the 2-DOF discrete-time input-output model. For unit-step and composite paths, a dynamic tractor simulator was used to test the controllers developed. The results showed that both controllers could control the tractor within $\pm$5cm error from the defined path and the position error of tractor by fuzzy controller was the bigger of the two. Through simulations, the output of self-tuning adaptive controller was relatively smooth, but the fuzzy controller was very sensitive by the change of gain and the shape of membership functions. Contrarily, modeling procedure of the fuzzy controller was simple, but the adaptive controller had very complex procedure of design and showed that control performance was affected greatly by the order of its model.