Abstract:With the improvement of the farm mechanization level, more ‘corporate’ style farming emerged. For example, more than one harvester collaborated with each other to complete the task of harvesting operations. The new ‘corporate’ style farming created several new challenges for the agricultural machinery navigation, and the group navigation was the trend of the development of agricultural machinery navigation technology. Group collaborative navigation control is the critical technical problem to be resolved. In order to solve this problem, a collaborative navigation control method based on the leader-follower structure was proposed. Firstly, the harvester group based on master-slave structure was introduced, and a kinematics model of harvester group was established on the basis of kinematics analysis. Secondly, a formation keeping control law and a path following control law were designed on the basis of feedback linearization and sliding mode control theory. Finally, in order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed model and method, the formation experiments were carried out. When the leader and follower ran at speed of 1.0m/s, the average error of the leader and follower were respectively 5.81cm and 5.93cm. The experimental results showed that the average navigation errors of the harvester group were similar to the average navigation error of a single farm machinery, and the proposed method could meet the harvester navigation demand.