Kinematic trajectory tracking controller for an all-terrain Ackermann steering vehicle

Abstract

In the last few years the number of applications of autonomous mobile robots to outdoor and off-road tasks, like border surveillance and monitoring, search and rescue, agriculture, driveless mobility has been rapidly increasing. Among the huge number of functionalities that are required to make a vehicle an autonomous robot, localisation, path planning and trajectory tracking are the most important. This paper proposes a novel approach to solve the trajectory tracking problem of an Ackermann steering vehicle. A multi-body dynamic model of the vehicle is proposed as a mean to tune and validate the tracking controller. The proposal is supported by an experimental validation, that shows the effectiveness of the trajectory tracking controller and its performance in comparison with the accuracy of the localisation algorithm.