With the development of smart agriculture, articulated tractors are increasingly applied in hilly and mountainous areas, where precise path tracking under lateral slippage remains a major challenge. Due to the articulated structure, the front and rear vehicle bodies exhibit different responses to terrain disturbances, making conventional single-point reference tracking insufficient for accurately describing whole-vehicle deviation. To address this issue, this study proposes a novel multi-point tracking deviation index that integrates the deviations of the front axle center, articulation point, and rear axle center. Based on this index, a systematic comparison of different reference points, including the centroid, incenter, and circumcenter of the characteristic triangle, is conducted through co-simulation experiments. The results demonstrate that the centroid yields the smallest whole-vehicle comprehensive deviation, achieving average deviations of 0.040 and 0.037 m under U -shaped and closed-curve paths, respectively, corresponding to reductions of 87% and 88% compared with the traditional articulation-point-based method. These findings indicate that the centroid provides the most balanced and robust reference point for articulated tractor path tracking under terrain-induced slippage, offering an effective trade-off between tracking accuracy and computational efficiency for autonomous operations in complex agricultural environments.
Zhao et al. (Wed,) studied this question.