Cooperative Control of Two-Vehicle Transportation Based on Time-Varying Distance Between Vehicles

Abstract

For two-vehicle cooperative transportation control, the typical methods are to keep the relative heading angle of the two vehicles constant and to realize cooperative transportation by using the characteristics of mecanum wheels. These methods do not apply to the requirements of the highway scene for the trafficability and robustness of two-vehicle transportation. To solve these problems, a cooperative control method based on a time-varying distance model was proposed. First, a multiaxis all-wheel-steering kinematic model was constructed based on the proportional steering principle. The reference rotation angles of each wheel were output by the model predictive control (MPC), which could realize trajectory tracking, with the current vehicle state and longitudinal speed prediction sequence as inputs. Second, the leader–follower strategy was adopted to build a dynamic reference distance of the path-between-vehicles model based on trajectory tracking deviation, vehicle states, and road information. On this basis, a two-vehicle cooperative prediction equation was established, and it output the longitudinal speed of the follower through the MPC. Finally, Simulink/TruckSim cosimulation was used to verify the effectiveness of the cooperative control method, which provides a new control idea for improving the efficiency of bulk transportation. The effectiveness and robustness of the collaborative control strategy were verified by Simulink/TruckSim cosimulation and a real vehicle experiment, which provides a new control idea for improving the efficiency of large cargo transportation.