Cascaded approach to the path-following problem for N-trailer robots

Abstract

By application of the cascaded control paradigm a highly-scalable control law is proposed for articulated mobile robots equipped with arbitrary number of trailers (N-trailers) for the path-following task. The concept relies on utilization of the novel path-following controller, recently published by Morro et al., devised for the unicycle kinematics of the last trailer (outer loop), and then on transformation of the resultant control functions along a vehicle kinematic chain to a tractor segment (inner loop). A control law proposed in the paper can be applied into all the known types of N-trailer robots (nSNT, GNT, and SNT) under the sign-homogeneity assumption for hitching offsets of trailers. The method has been examined by simulation examples.