Pole Placement applied to drive a Truck and Trailer in backward. A didactic view

Driving a Truck and Trailer in backward is a challenging problem to address the control teaching of non-linear unstable systems. The paper shows techniques to formulate de feedback control problem, to find the equilibrium state, to linearize the system and to design the state feedback controllers with Luenberger observers tuned with pole placement techniques. Results show that the state feedback controller can stabilize the truck and trailer, moreover, the controlled system has good behaviour in following sinusoidal trajectories when driving in backward.