Modeling and control of a novel narrow vehicle

There is a growing interest on narrow vehicles which can partially solve the parking, congestion and pollution issues associated with urban transportation. A novel narrow vehicle, UW-Car, which is based on a mobile wheeled inverted pendulum (MWIP) platform and a movable seat is proposed in the paper. The three dimensional dynamic model of the underactuated system running on the flat ground is derived by using Lagrange´s motion equation. Because of the strong nonlinearity of the UW-Car system, a sliding mode control (SMC) scheme is chosen to ensure the state variables converge to desired values. The velocity control of UW-Car is discussed in this paper. By using the proposed controller, a UW-Car can move at a desired velocity and tracking a given yaw angle velocity while keeping the seat to be always upright. Numerical simulations are provided to verify and illustrate the effectiveness of proposed approaches.