Trajectory planning and robust tracking control for a class of active articulated tractor-trailer vehicle with on-axle structure

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.