Stabilization of wheeled vehicles by hybrid nonlinear time-varying feedback laws

Hybrid feedback control laws are constructed for stabilization of wheeled vehicles consisting of tractors with trailers. The equations of motion are first transformed into a special canonical form, known as the multi-input extended power form. A hybrid stabilization technique developed by Kolmanovsky et al. (1995) is applied to develop the controller structure. These controllers operate by switching at discrete time-instants between various time-periodic feedback functions. Implementation issues are briefly addressed for several wheeled vehicle examples.