Path Tracking Control of an Articulated Road Roller With Sideslip Compensation

Unmanned road roller has become an attractive solution to reduce operators’ working intensity and improve compaction efficiency. As a result of working in bumpy environments, sideslip effect is unavoidable during the compacting process. In order to guarantee the reliability and stability of path tracking control, a novel and effective method based on preview control and sideslip compensation is proposed in this paper. The kinematic and dynamic models of articulated road roller considering sideslip angles are obtained first. Then, a preview controller with sideslip compensation (PCSC) is developed to eliminate the path tracking errors between the actual path and the desired path. To evaluate the control performance of the proposed method, simulation under the MATLAB/Simulink and automatic compaction experiments at the construction site were performed with initial errors. Finally, the simulation and experimental results show that the path tracking errors can converge to zero as time goes by. The proposed method has the ability to navigate an articulated road roller to track a desired path in the existence of sideslip, only regarding the steering angle dynamic as control input. Compared with other benchmark method, it not only improves the control accuracy, but also increases the convergence rate, proving its effectiveness and feasibility. All these also demonstrate the practical value and validity of the proposed models with sideslip.