Steering Limitations for a Vehicle Pulling Passive Trailers

Motion control of articulated vehicles composed of a nonholonomic tractor and several passive trailers is a difficult underactuated problem. This paper proposes the application of steering limitations to the tractor to avoid inter unit collision during forward motion. This method can be used for systems that combine any type of on-axle and off-axle joints. We propose an algorithm to compute curvature bounds based on the analysis of steady and transient responses. These limitations can be introduced at the path tracking and path planning levels for autonomous navigation. Thus, the tractor can be controlled to follow admissible paths much in the same way as when it does not tow any trailer. The method has been validated experimentally with an off-axle two-trailer setup attached to the tracked mobile robot Auriga-alpha.

[1]  Woojin Chung,et al.  A passive multiple trailer system for indoor service robots , 2001, Proceedings 2001 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. Expanding the Societal Role of Robotics in the the Next Millennium (Cat. No.01CH37180).

[2]  Anthony Mandow,et al.  Forward path tracking for mobile robots with several trailers , 2004 .

[3]  Richard M. Murray,et al.  Nilpotent bases for a class of nonintegrable distributions with applications to trajectory generation for nonholonomic systems , 1994, Math. Control. Signals Syst..

[4]  James L. Crowley.  Asynchronous control of orientation and displacement in a robot vehicle , 1989, Proceedings, 1989 International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[5]  Yalou Huang,et al.  Concept of equivalent size for tractor-trailer mobile robots and its application to path planning , 2002, Proceedings of the 4th World Congress on Intelligent Control and Automation (Cat. No.02EX527).

[6]  Linda Bushnell,et al.  An obstacle avoidance algorithm for a car pulling trailers with off-axle hitching , 1995, Proceedings of 1995 34th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control.

[7]  Woojin Chung,et al.  Design of steering mechanism and control of nonholonomic trailer systems , 2001, IEEE Trans. Robotics Autom..

[8]  Kazuo Tanaka,et al.  Advanced fuzzy control of a trailer type mobile robot-stability analysis and model-based fuzzy control , 1994, Proceedings Sixth International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence. TAI 94.

[9]  J. Laumond.  Controllability of a multibody mobile robot , 1991 .

[10]  Javier González,et al.  Mobile robot motion estimation by 2D scan matching with genetic and iterative closest point algorithms , 2006, J. Field Robotics.

[11]  Ilya Kolmanovsky,et al.  Developments in nonholonomic control problems , 1995 .

[12]  Claudio Altafini,et al.  Path following with reduced off-tracking for multibody wheeled vehicles , 2003, IEEE Trans. Control. Syst. Technol..

[13]  Jean-Paul Laumond,et al.  Flatness and small-time controllability of multibody mobile robots: Application to motion planning , 1997 .

[14]  Richard Hurteau,et al.  Path-tracking for tractor-trailers with hitching of both the on-axle and the off-axle kind , 2002, Proceedings of the IEEE Internatinal Symposium on Intelligent Control.

[15]  Salvador Pedraza,et al.  Approximating Kinematics for Tracked Mobile Robots , 2005, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[16]  Anibal Ollero,et al.  Fuzzy supervisory path tracking of mobile reports , 1993 .

[17]  Paolo Bolzern,et al.  Path-tracking for articulated vehicles with off-axle hitching , 1998, IEEE Trans. Control. Syst. Technol..

[18]  O.J. Sordalen,et al.  Exponential stabilization of a car with n trailers , 1993, Proceedings of 32nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control.

[19]  Mitsuji Sampei,et al.  Path tracking control of trailer-like mobile robot , 1991, Proceedings IROS '91:IEEE/RSJ International Workshop on Intelligent Robots and Systems '91.

[20]  Jorge L. Martinez,et al.  PATH TRACKING FOR MOBILE ROBOTS WITH A TRAILER , 2002 .

[21]  A. Sahai,et al.  Off-tracking bounds for a car pulling trailers with kingpin hitching , 1994, Proceedings of 1994 33rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control.

[22]  S. Sastry,et al.  Trajectory generation for the N-trailer problem using Goursat normal form , 1993, Proceedings of 32nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control.

[23]  Charles E. Thorpe,et al.  Integrated mobile robot control , 1991 .

[24]  Pascal Morin,et al.  Chained form approximation of a driftless system. Application to the exponential stabilization of the general N-trailer system , 2001 .