MPC-based trajectory tracking control of unmanned underwater tracked bulldozer considering track slipping and motion smoothing

Abstract

The trajectory tracking control strategy of unmanned tracked underwater bulldozer (UUTB) can improve the efficiency of trenching and dredging. The soft sediment increases the running difficulties while UUTB is operating on the river bed. The operation of UUTB will cause track slip between the tracks and soft sediment, resulting in the heading deviation of UUTB. A MPC-based trajectory tracking controller is developed. The effect of track slip rate on the deviation of trajectory tracking control is analyzed. The MPC-based strategy considering slipping and smoothing (MPC-CSS) is proposed in this paper to improve the anti-interference ability of track slipping in the process of trajectory tracking. The simulation results show that the lateral stability of UUTB can be improved by 72.5% with the proposed MPC-CSS strategy. A reduced-scale model prototype of UUTB based on a robot operating system (ROS) is designed. The trajectory tracking control performance on different artificial roads built in the lab is verified. The experimental results indicate that the proposed MPC-CSS strategy follows the desired trajectory compared with pure pursuit control (PPC) and MPC strategy. The effectiveness of the proposed MPC-CSS strategy of reduced-scale model prototype UUTB is verified, which effectively reduces the track slipping and improves the operating stability.