Rollover Prevention Control of Oversized Cargo Cooperative Transportation System with Robust Path Tracking Performance

The rollover prevention problem of a fully-automated oversized cargo cooperative transportation system (CTS) is investigated. The effective anti-rollover performance is achieved while maintaining accurate and robust path following of the payload with the proposed two-layer cooperative controller. The complex coupled motion model of the CTS is established through a Constraint-oriented Dividing-and-Integrating (CoDI) strategy. Then a leakage-type adaptive robust controller (LARC) is proposed on the first layer to guarantee robust and stable tracking of the reference path and replanned longitudinal velocity of the payload, despite the existence of multiple uncertainties. An embedded MPC on the second layer provides auxiliary rollover prevention effect with the active anti-rollover actuator considering the input and output constraints. The effectiveness of the cooperative controller is validated through the comparison with the baseline methods via numerical simulation. The results illustrate that the proposed method can significantly improve the driving safety of the CTS when a rollover accident is prone to occur.