Design of Steering Mechanism and Control of Nonholonomic Trailer Systems.

Abstract

A wheeled mobile robot with trailers has been studied as a class of nonholonomic systems. It is proved that a tractor and all trailers can be stabilized to desired positions via nonholonomic motion control. On the other hand, trailers have been developed and widely used in the industry. The main focus of such designs is on reducing tracking error from reference trajectory. In this paper, we try to bridge between these two approaches. We develop a design theory of trailer systems with passive steering. These systems possess a good performance in practical path following, and accept proved and established various control strategies for nonholonomic systems.