Back-driving a truck with suboptimal distance trajectories: a fuzzy logic control approach

This paper provides a suboptimal solution to the problem of automatically back-driving a truck using the natural parabolic paths as the shortest moving distance requirement. By applying fuzzy logic control techniques, a controller with nine rules is developed, which works well even without using a mathematical system model. As long as the states (position and orientation) of the truck are measurable at each discrete-time step during the control process, this controller can drive the truck to follow any feasible trajectories (their smallest radii are no less than the smallest radius of the curve along which the truck can travel), and to move successfully into a prescribed parking lot. In addition to the design of the controller, controllability and stability of the control system are briefly discussed under the condition that only partial information about the current states of the system are available. Simulation results are presented, to demonstrate the accuracy and effectiveness of this new fuzzy logic controller and to compare its control performance with other fuzzy logic controllers that were designed for the same purpose under the same conditions but without using any optimality criterion.