An adaptive sliding mode controller for the lateral control of articulated long vehicles

Today, use of articulated long vehicles is surging. The advantages of using large articulated vehicles are that fewer drivers are used and fuel consumption decreases significantly. The major problem of these vehicles is inappropriate lateral performance at high speed. The articulated long vehicle discussed in this article consists of tractor and two semi-trailer units that widely used to carry goods. The main purpose of this article is to design an adaptive sliding mode controller that is resistant to changing the load of trailers and measuring the noise of the sensors. Control variables are considered as yaw rate and lateral velocity of tractor and also first and second articulation angles. These four variables are regulated by steering the axles of the articulated vehicle. In this article after developing and verifying the dynamic model, a new adaptive sliding mode controller is designed on the basis of a nonlinear model. This new adaptive sliding mode controller steers the axles of the tractor and trailers through estimation of mass and moment of inertia of the trailers to maintain the stability of the vehicle. An articulated vehicle has been exposed to a lane change maneuver based on the trailer load in three different modes (low, medium and high load) and on a dry and wet road. Simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of this controller to maintain the stability of this articulated vehicle in a low-speed steep steer and high-speed lane change maneuvers. Finally, the robustness of this controller has been shown in the presence of measurement noise of the sensors. In fact, the main innovation of this article is in the designing of an adaptive sliding mode controller, which by changing the load of the trailers, in high-speed and low-speed maneuvers and in dry and wet roads, has the best performance compared to conventional sliding mode and linear controllers.