An ESO-based integrated trajectory tracking control for tractor–trailer vehicles with various constraints and physical limitations

This paper develops an effective integrated control strategy for the trajectory tracking control of a tractor–trailer vehicle which suffers from inaccessible system states and uncertain disturbance for practical implementation. In addition, diverse problems, such as nonholonomic constraints, underactuated dynamics, physical limitations, etc, can be resolved favourably all together. Aiming to the vehicle trajectory tracking, a constrained model predictive control (MPC) is introduced as a trajectory tracking module, by which the underactuated dynamics, various constraints and physical limitations, can be tackled at the same time. For the desired velocity tracking, a robust global terminal sliding mode control (GTSMC) is employed to guarantee the finite-time convergence of the velocity tracking process, which will improve the transient performance to a great extent. Particularly, in the absence of velocity information, an extended state observer (ESO) is developed to estimate the vehicle velocity in addition to simultaneously obtaining the uncertain disturbance information, which offers prerequisite for the previous control approaches. The simulation results confirm that the presented control strategy can synthesise varied control techniques effectively and deal with diverse problems for the trajectory tracking of tractor–trailer vehicles successfully.