Helping a driver in backward docking with N-trailer vehicles by the passive control-assistance system

The paper presents a control-assistance system devised for human drivers of articulated vehicles equipped with arbitrary number of trailers mounted in the off-axle manner. The proposed assistance system is passive, which means that it does not interact directly with a vehicle, but it only suggests control action to a human operator solely by a (passive) human-machine interface (HMI). In contrast to the active assistance systems proposed for N-trailers in the literature, the passive assistant does not require installation in a vehicle any high-end actuation subsystems like steer-by-wire or cruise control. The concept presented in the paper utilizes the cascaded VFO control law as a control-assistance function and the HMI with a simple and intuitive graphical interface, which allows a driver to focus an attention only on a single bar-like indicator. The system has been devised for N-trailer vehicles with a tractor of differentially-driven or car-like kinematics. Effectiveness of the assistance system has been illustrated by experimental results obtained with a laboratory-scale vehicle.