Controller design of a truck and multiple trailer system

The use of truck-and-trailer systems is an attractive solution to boost the load carrying capacity of land transportation vehicles. However, the steering of such system is problematic due to the lack of sufficient degree-of-freedoms in the available control. The difficulty further increases when obstacles are encountered in the working space. Here, the virtual-robot tracking strategy and force field method are employed such that the truck is steered to follow a desired trajectory without collision with obstacles. The generation of drive speed and turn-rate is tackled as an optimization problem where the particle swarm optimization algorithm is used for its promising performance and implementation simplicity. Simulation studies on a truck-and-trailer system moving on irregular paths in obstacle filled working space are conducted using the developed intelligent controller and satisfactory results have illustrated the feasibility of the suggested approach.