Path planning and tracking of a 4WD4WS vehicle to be driven under force control

The aim of this paper is to investigate the possibility of developing a system where forces at the wheels of a ground vehicle are controlled to guide the vehicle along a predetermined path. Any deviations from the desired path is handled using Bézier curve segments that put the vehicle back on track. The Bézier curve segments determine the necessary forces at the wheels. The future aim is to implement independent force control at each of the drive/steering modules of the vehicle. The vehicle is considered to be a rigid body with known inertia and mass. The paper presents path generation using Bézier curves, the extraction of desired forces and the determination of desired steering and propulsion to achieve the desired forces at the wheels of the vehicle. The forces and the control inputs such as the steering angles are then applied to a four wheel driven and four wheel steered vehicle subjected to slip in an open loop setting. Note that this paper does not address the force control issues. Simulation data are generated to validate the proposed methodology.

[1]  Jie Chen,et al.  Robust anti-sliding control of autonomous vehicles in presence of lateral disturbances , 2011 .

[2]  M. Tomizuka,et al.  Nonlinear tire lateral force versus slip angle curve identification , 2004, Proceedings of the 2004 American Control Conference.

[3]  J. R. Zhang,et al.  Sliding mode controller for automatic path tracking of vehicles , 2002, Proceedings of the 2002 American Control Conference (IEEE Cat. No.CH37301).

[4]  Igor Skrjanc,et al.  Tracking-error model-based predictive control for mobile robots in real time , 2007, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[5]  Majura F. Selekwa,et al.  Path tracking control of four wheel independently steered ground robotic vehicles , 2011, IEEE Conference on Decision and Control and European Control Conference.

[6]  Wu Weiguo,et al.  Backstepping design for path tracking of mobile robots , 1999 .

[7]  Robert Joan-Arinyo.  Geometric modeling. Second edition by Michael E. Mortenson : John Wiley and Sons, Inc., Chicester, hardcover, 1997, 523 pp, ISBN 0-471-12957-7 , 1998, Comput. Aided Des..

[8]  R. Sreerama Kumar,et al.  A Bezier curve based path planning in a multi-agent robot soccer system without violating the acceleration limits , 2009, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[9]  Gil Jin Yang,et al.  Smooth Trajectory Planning Along Bezier Curve for Mobile Robots with Velocity Constraints , 2013 .

[10]  Shou-Tao Peng,et al.  On robust bounded control of the combined wheel slip with integral compensation for an autonomous 4WS4WD vehicle , 2007 .

[11]  Maarouf Saad,et al.  A higher level path tracking controller for a four-wheel differentially steered mobile robot , 2006, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[12]  Alexander Verl,et al.  Singularity avoidance for over-actuated, pseudo-omnidirectional, wheeled mobile robots , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[13]  Philippe Martinet,et al.  High accuracy path tracking for vehicles in presence of sliding: Application to farm vehicle automatic guidance for agricultural tasks , 2006, Auton. Robots.