A Fractional Adaptation Scheme for Lateral Control of an AGV

Lateral control of an autonomous guided vehicle is influenced strongly by both the longitudinal speed and the position input command (magnitude of the reference signal) of the vehicle. For that reason some suitable strategies for governing the vehicle are adaptive and robust controllers. In this article, an adaptive scheme which combines a model reference approach with a fractional order adjustment rule for a feedforward gain adjustment is proposed. Two parameters can be tuned to obtain robustness with respect to variations in speed and magnitude of the reference signal: Adaptation gain, and derivative order of the adjustment rule. A model is developed for the vehicle, the design procedure is discussed, and simulation results are obtained to show the advantages the proposed fractional adaptation scheme.