Agile maneuvering with intelligent articulated vehicles: a control perspective

Articulated vehicles are the popular means of freight and public transportation. Current trends and development forecasts indicate an increase of their use in the near future, mainly for economic and environmental reasons. Modular High Capacity Vehicles and articulated urban buses are the examples of modern transportation solutions that require agile maneuvering in cluttered spaces. Since maneuvering with articulated vehicles is a highly non-intuitive and burdening process for human-drivers, it seems reasonable to equip this kind of vehicles with systems which provide (semi-) autonomous maneuvering capabilities. In this paper, we consider a modular cascade-like control design methodology that is applicable to intelligent articulated vehicles enabling them to perform complex maneuvers either through a driver-assistance system or in an autonomous control mode. First, we discuss key properties of the so-called N-trailer kinematics, and the correspondence between practical motion problems defined for articulated vehicles and their formulation in the control engineering language. Next, the modular cascade like control system structure is presented which allows solving various control tasks in a unified manner for multi-body vehicles of different kinematic structures and any number of segments. Solutions to selected control problems are illustrated by numerical and experimental results. (C) 2019, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.