An adaptive sliding mode controller for the lateral control of articulated long vehicles

Abstract

Today, use of articulated long vehicles is surging. The advantages of using large articulated vehicles are that fewer drivers are used and fuel consumption decreases significantly. The major problem of these vehicles is inappropriate lateral performance at high speed. The articulated long vehicle discussed in this article consists of tractor and two semi-trailer units that widely used to carry goods. The main purpose of this article is to design an adaptive sliding mode controller that is resistant to changing the load of trailers and measuring the noise of the sensors. Control variables are considered as yaw rate and lateral velocity of tractor and also first and second articulation angles. These four variables are regulated by steering the axles of the articulated vehicle. In this article after developing and verifying the dynamic model, a new adaptive sliding mode controller is designed on the basis of a nonlinear model. This new adaptive sliding mode controller steers the axles of the tractor and trailers through estimation of mass and moment of inertia of the trailers to maintain the stability of the vehicle. An articulated vehicle has been exposed to a lane change maneuver based on the trailer load in three different modes (low, medium and high load) and on a dry and wet road. Simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of this controller to maintain the stability of this articulated vehicle in a low-speed steep steer and high-speed lane change maneuvers. Finally, the robustness of this controller has been shown in the presence of measurement noise of the sensors. In fact, the main innovation of this article is in the designing of an adaptive sliding mode controller, which by changing the load of the trailers, in high-speed and low-speed maneuvers and in dry and wet roads, has the best performance compared to conventional sliding mode and linear controllers.

Development of the active disturbance rejection control method for increasing the stability of the long articulated vehicle

“…These noises are the Gaussian white type with mean zero. 27–29 According to the equations of the vehicle, the matrices x ( t ) and f ( x ( t ) , u ( t ) , t ) are as follows…”

A new automated motion planning system of heavy accelerating articulated vehicle in a real road traffic scenario

“…The outcomes showed that the performance of the proposed controller in comparison to conventional controllers was enhanced, particularly in high speed lane change manoeuvre. 40 Autonomous vehicle technologies are complex systems. The systems can be divided into several parts and solved stepwise under different conditions.…”

“…The applied lateral forces on the front and rear axles of the tractor and the axle of the semitrailer are substituted in three independent equations of the 3-DOF dynamic model of the AV. Accordingly, equations (36), (37), and (38) can be rewritten based on equations (39), (40), and (41). Finally, matrix form of the lateral dynamics of the tractor-semitrailer is presented in equation (42).…”

“…The outcomes showed that the performance of the proposed controller in comparison to conventional controllers was enhanced, particularly in high speed lane change manoeuvre. 40…”

Modeling and performance evaluation of a heavy-duty vehicle based on the hydraulic power steering system

“…In 2014, Islam and He 27 presented a comparative study of multi-trailer articulated heavy-vehicle models, and also the proposed model was verified via a nonlinear model of the TruckSim software. In 2018, Esmaeili et al 28,29 used a long articulated vehicle, which was mathematically modeled using Newton’s equations in MATLAB software and verified by TruckSim software results. Also, these vehicles offer enhanced efficiency and emissions, but reduced low-speed maneuverability and high-speed stability.…”