Speaker
Description
Current development trends in the freight and public transportation lead to the so-called Large Capacity Vehicles, which in most practical applications become articulated structures. Maneuvering with multi-articulated vehicles is especially difficult, burdening, and can be even dangerous, also for experienced human-drivers. Although most of the people intuitively agrees with the challenging nature of articulated vehicles, the actual origins of this nature is not so clear for many. During the lecture we will address this problem by explaining and discussing numerous interesting kinematic properties of articulated mobile structures, which all can reveal together in a single vehicle making it difficult to control. On the other hand, such a big control difficulty observed in so practical problem may be very inspiring and fascinating for control researchers looking for an efficient feedback control system which could help the drivers execute agile maneuvers with long articulated vehicles. We will address the control design problem by introducing a cascade-like modular feedback control system, which enables agile automated maneuvering with vehicles comprising an arbitrarily number of segments. It will be shown how the cascade-like control system can be modified and applied as a supporting tool for the drivers of electric buses as a part of the advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) to help executing precise maneuvering in the public transportation tasks. The lecture will be illustrated by selected simulation and experimental results obtained in a laboratory scale and in-field conditions.
