Autonomous navigation technology plays a crucial role in advancing smart agriculture by enhancing operational efficiency, optimizing resource utilization, and reducing labor dependency. With the rapid integration of information technology, modern agricultural machinery increasingly incorporates advanced techniques such as high-precision positioning, environmental perception, path planning, and path-tracking control. This paper presents a comprehensive review of recent advancements in these core technologies, systematically analyzing their methodologies, advantages, and application scenarios. Despite notable progress, considerable challenges persist, primarily due to the unstructured nature of farmland, varying terrain conditions, and the demand for robust and adaptive control strategies. This review also discusses current limitations and outlines prospective research directions, aiming to provide valuable insights for the future development and practical deployment of autonomous navigation systems in agricultural machinery. Future research is expected to focus on enhancing multi-modal perception under occlusion and variable lighting conditions, developing terrain-aware path planning algorithms that adapt to irregular field boundaries and elevation changes and designing robust control strategies that integrate model-based and learning-based approaches to manage disturbances and non-linearity. Furthermore, tighter integration among perception, planning, and control modules will be crucial for improving system-level intelligence and coordination in real-world agricultural environments.

To improve autonomous path execution of a wheeled mower in standardized orchards, an ROS-based navigation control system integrating dual-antenna RTK-GNSS positioning and heading, an industrial computer, CAN-based drive control, and wireless manual takeover was developed. Parameterized reference paths consisting of straight sections and U-shaped turns were generated for inter-row operation, and an adaptive Pure Pursuit controller was implemented within the ROS framework. Three repeated field trials were conducted on a U-shaped path at a nominal speed of 0.8 m/s, with conventional Pure Pursuit using a fixed 2.0 m look-ahead distance as a reference. The mower completed the planned path under both controller settings. For the adaptive controller, the mean absolute lateral errors in the curved, straight, and overall sections were 0.124, 0.035, and 0.047 m, respectively. The corresponding overall error for PP-2m was 0.115 m. These results support the feasibility of the developed system for RTK-GNSS-guided closed-loop path tracking under the tested standardized-orchard conditions.