With the rapid development of unmanned agricultural machinery technology, the accuracy and stability of agricultural machinery path tracking have become key challenges in achieving precision agriculture. To address the issues of insufficient accuracy and stability in path tracking for rice transplanters in paddy fields, this study proposes a composite control strategy that integrates the extended line-of-sight (LOS) guidance law with an adaptive fuzzy sliding mode control law. By establishing a two degree of freedom dynamic model of the rice transplanter, two extended state observers are designed to estimate the longitudinal and lateral velocities of the rice transplanter in real time. A dynamic compensation mechanism for the sideslip angle is introduced, significantly enhancing the adaptability of the traditional look-ahead guidance law to soil slippage. Furthermore, by combining the approximation capability of fuzzy systems with the adaptive adjustment method of sliding mode control gains, a front wheel steering control law is designed to suppress complex environmental disturbances. The global stability of the closed-loop system is rigorously verified using the Lyapunov theory. Simulation results show that compared to the traditional Stanley algorithm, the proposed method reduces the maximum lateral error by 38.3%, shortens the online time by 23.9%, and decreases the steady-state error by 15.5% in straight-line path tracking. In curved path tracking, the lateral and heading steady-state errors are reduced by 19.2% and 14.6%, respectively. Field experiments validate the effectiveness of this method in paddy fields, with the absolute lateral error stably controlled within 0.1 m, an average error of 0.04 m, and a variance of 0.0027 m².

This paper studies the straight-line path-following problem on the lateral plane for fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (FWUAVs) which are susceptible to uncertainties. Firstly, based on the natural frame’s location on the prescribed reference paths, the command yaw angle (which is the basis for yaw angle control system design) is solved analytically by combining it with the errors of path following, attack angle, sideslip angle, attitude angles, and geometric parameters of the prescribed reference paths. Secondly, by considering complicated dynamic characteristics, a linear extended state observer is designed to estimate uncertainties such as nonlinearities, couplings, and unmodeled dynamics whose estimated values are incorporated into the continuous-time predictive controllers for feedback compensation. Finally, numerical simulations are conducted to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method, including reduced tracking errors and enhanced robustness in the closed-loop system, as compared to the conventional nonlinear dynamic inversion and sliding mode control approaches.