Robust prescribed performance-based control of autonomous tractor-trailers convoy with limited communication range

Abstract

This paper investigates the problem of a nonlinear platoon controller design for a group of autonomous tractor-trailers with limited communication ranges in order to increase the load transportation capacity. The main control objective is to force each consecutive pair of tractor-trailers to follow each other in a convoy-like formation based on their posture and velocity measurements in the presence of unmodelled dynamics and external disturbances. The prescribed performance strategy is effectively applied to the relative range and angle between each successive pair in the group to preserve their connectivity without any possible collision by defining some preassigned performance characteristics on the transient and steady-state responses. A high-gain observer, an adaptive robust controller and a three-layer neural network are heuristically utilised to develop an efficient robust output-feedback platoon controller as well. The stability of the entire state-feedback and output-feedback control system is investigated by the Lyapunov stability method and some numerical simulations are presented to validate the controller efficiency in an autonomous transportation application.

Keywords:

• Adaptive robust controller
• collision avoidance
• convoy-like formation
• high-gain observer
• limited communication range
• multi-layer neural networks
• prescribed performance
• tractor-trailers

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the journal editor and anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions which effectively improved the quality of the original manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Omid Elhaki

Omid Elhaki was born in Esfahan, Iran, on 19 May 1991. He successfully received his B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from Iran University of Applied Sciences and Technology (UAST) in 2015 and received the M.Sc. degree with distinction in control engineering from Islamic Azad University Najafabad Branch, Iran, in 2017. His research interests include adaptive control, robust control, intelligent control, reinforcement learning, Euler-Lagrange systems, and control of uncertain autonomous nonlinear systems.

Khoshnam Shojaei

Khoshnam Shojaei was born in Esfahan, Iran, on 8 March 1981. He received his B. S. degree, M.S. degree, Ph.D. degree with distinction in Electrical Engineering from Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST) in 2004, 2007 and 2011, respectively. Currently, he is an associate professor in Najafabad Branch, Islamic Azad University. His research areas are adaptive control of nonlinear systems, control of autonomous robots including land, air and ocean vehicles, and navigation of mobile robots.