Path following with reduced off-tracking for multibody wheeled vehicles
Claudio Altafini
IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, 11(4):598-605, 2003.
Our purpose is to provide a formulation of the path
following problem for multibody kinematic wheeled vehicles aiming to
keep the
whole vehicle at a reduced distance from a given path, i.e. to reduce
the off-tracking distance of the vehicle from the path.
In the proposed setting, the stabilization problem for paths of
constant curvature is locally
solvable by a simple linear feedback law.
In order to quantify how much cumbersome a vehicle is along a given path, we
provide two different estimates of the off-tracking bound,
i.e. of the minimal clearance that has to be left around
the path in order for the vehicle to pass through in case of perfect
tracking.
Experimental results on a miniature multibody vehicle are reported.
postscript file (g-zipped)