Navigating an articulated vehicle and reversing with a trailer

This paper describes two related tests; to navigate an articulated lawn mower and to reverse a mobile robot with a trailer. In both cases the vehicles are to follow a prespecified trajectory. The navigation principal is based on measured directions to several identical beacons, consisting of strips of reflective tapes. The angular sensor is a rotating laser for the illumination of the beacons and a highly sensitive electro-optical receiver for detecting the directions to the beacons. A Kalman filter is used to combine the measurements from the odometers with the detected angles to the known position of the beacons. To measure the angle between the robot and the trailer the same laser was used. This was done by placing two reflective beacons on the trailer. The repeatability was within 2 centimetre at low speed. The navigation of these two different types of vehicles turns out to be, essentially, the same problem. The sensitivities are different. Emphasis is on robust state estimation