Trailer Steering Control of a Tractor-Trailer Robot

In this paper, we consider active trailer steering control as a means to improve the maneuverability of (long) truck–trailer combinations during cornering. Hereto, we formulate the problem of reducing the so-called swept path width during cornering and that of eliminating unsafe tail swing of the trailer as a tracking control problem. We present a kinematic tractor–trailer model including off-axle hitching, on the basis of which we design nonlinear control strategies solving this tracking problem. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is evidenced experimentally on a robotic tractor–trailer platform.