Indexed by:Journal Papers

Date of Publication:2020-07-01

Journal:EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CONTROL

Included Journals:SCIE

Volume:54

Page Number:87-98

ISSN No.:0947-3580

Key Words:Active articulated; Tractor-trailer vehicle; Trajectory tracking; Model predictive control (MPC); Sliding mode control (SMC)

Abstract:Traditional articulated vehicles exhibit poor steering performance since there exist no direct rotating moment for the underactuated trailers, which cause such vehicles nearly cannot work well in the narrow space. To overcome this shortcoming associated with the traditional articulated vehicles, an active articulated structure is proposed, in which a steering motor is introduced at the articulated joint of tractor and trailer, in addition to utilizing mecanum wheels as trailer wheels. On the basis of this structure, a coordinated control method is designed to ensure the vehicle kinematics constraints and dynamic maneuverability. The coordination control consists of two level controllers. On the level of kinematics, model predictive control (MPC) is adopted as posture controller, which can solve the non-holonomic problem of the whole active articulated tractor-trailer vehicle system; On the dynamic level, a sliding mode control (SMC) is introduced to design a dynamic controller to track the desired velocities generated online, which can increase the robustness of the system. The simulation results show that the proposed active articulated tractor-trailer vehicle system has better maneuverability compared with the traditional one, and the proposed control strategy can ensure the required control effect. (C) 2020 European Control Association. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.