The concept of autonomous driving is becoming increasingly familiar in the automotive and “in-door” automation systems fields. Furthermore, the industrial development is focusing its efforts on industry 4.0, whose some main features are data transfer, programming, systems interconnection and automation.
The agricultural sector just recently has experienced the first examples of autonomous agricultural vehicles, although agricultural mechanization has reached a good level of automation. Indeed, many examples of automatic machineries are already present in the market such as little robots for the execution of some operations.
This work focuses on modelling and simulation of a self-driving orchard tractor. The main goal was to reproduce the behaviour of the specialized vehicle, moving in an orchard or a vineyard and conducting automatic or semi-automatic operations. Modelling and simulation of the vehicle were realized through the interaction and co-simulation of MATLAB SIMULINK© and ADAMS View© software. MATLAB SIMULINK was used to implement the control logic, whereas ADAMS View was used to reproduce the dynamic behaviour of the vehicle. The aforementioned achievement was reached identifying the correct approach in terms of trajectory setting, path following and obstacle avoidance strategy.