Trajectory tracking control for tractor-trailer vehicles: a coordinated control approach

This article presents a coordinated control approach for a tractor-trailer vehicle such that a satisfactory trajectory tracking performance can be achieved, simultaneously guaranteeing vehicle kinematics restriction and dynamics maneuvers. The coordinated control is consisted of multilevel controllers, each of which is constructed by different algorithms to better clarify their specific advantages and defects, thereby establishing the composition principles of this multilevel architecture. In this regard, on the level of kinematics, linear quadratic regulator and model predictive control (MPC) are used to design the posture controller separately; on the level of dynamics, sliding mode control and global terminal sliding mode control (GTSMC) are introduced to design the dynamic controller for the tracking of the desired velocities generated online. The simulation results suggest that the combination by MPC and GTSMC can offer more favorable control performance for such kind of sophisticated vehicle system.