A Minimum Swept Path Control Strategy for Reversing Articulated Vehicles

This paper presents a new control strategy called Minimum Swept Path Control (MSPC) for reversing articulated heavy goods vehicles. It improves on previous Path Following Control (PFC) methods by minimising large excursions of the tractor unit. A preview distance is integrated into the MSPC algorithm to predict future vehicle states and feed them back into the control system to compensate state errors. The relationship between the length of preview distance and maximum lateral offsets is investigated, which can be used to optimise the preview distance. The relationship between maximum lateral offsets and the corresponding weights in the control cost function is also established in this preliminary study.