Anti-Jackknife Autonomous Truck Trailer for Path Following Control Using Genetic Algorithm

Controlling the autonomous truck system has a very high difficulty because the two parts of the truck are rigid (Head and Trailer) and the possibility of a jackknife effect occurring is high. There are a variety of reasons a jackknife accident can occur such as speeding or sudden turn. This paper describes the line following control of an autonomous truck trailer using a genetic search algorithm (GA) in a backward motion. Genetic Algorithm is used for gain tuning of the lateral velocity of truck and steering control parameter which are input controls of the system. Due to minimizing the tracking error of the controller design, Integral of Absolute Error (IAE) was employed as the fitness function of the algorithm with jackknife prevention constraint. A penalty method for transforming the constrained problem into an equivalent unconstrained problem has been proposed in this paper. The convergence behavior of the ordinary penalty function depends on the selection of penalty parameters. The optimization of the penalty function is achieved after several rounds of optimization where different values in each round and stopping after max iteration criteria are reached. The result showed that the methods can make the system remain in a constrained condition.