DOI: 10.3390/electronics15184246 ISSN: 2079-9292

Simulation-Based Evaluation of Robust Multi-Sensor Localization for Tracked Agricultural Robots Under Asymmetric Track Slip and Single-Coordinate GNSS Anomalies

Zuojin Li, Xin Zheng, Linlu Dong, Xianfeng Zhang, Rui Zhou, Bo Li, Bao Yu

Tracked agricultural robots operating on soft ground may experience asymmetric left–right track slip, while two-dimensional global navigation satellite system (GNSS) observations may contain a dominant anomaly in one coordinate. This simulation study evaluates a robust multi-sensor localization method for this coupled degradation. Independent left–right slip ratios are introduced into a six-state extended Kalman filter (EKF) to improve motion prediction. A coordinate-adaptive Huber extended Kalman filter (CAH-EKF) is then developed for GNSS updating. It combines component-wise normalized innovations and innovation jumps for coordinate-level anomaly detection, maps Huber weights to effective measurement covariance, and uses finite-state switching to confirm, maintain, and recover robust processing while retaining information from the relatively reliable coordinate. Simulation experiments on S-shaped and multi-U paths separate prediction-stage and update-stage effects. The independent-slip model improves over the common-slip model by 16.99–34.34% in position root mean square error (RMSE) and 29.11–36.27% in heading RMSE. Under sustained single-coordinate GNSS anomalies, CAH-EKF outperforms IS-EKF and remains competitive with Huber-IEKF. Under the main joint degradation experiments, the combined method yields 42.78–77.43% position and 27.05–76.33% heading improvements. Additional simulation checks covering slip excitation, path and motion changes, GNSS-degradation variants, and runtime further characterize the operating range of the method. These results support robust low-cost localization using encoders, a yaw-rate gyroscope, and a two-dimensional GNSS within the tested simulation conditions.