Control of a Cooperative Transportation System Consisting of Two Vehicles with Articulation Points at Their Centers of Mass

This paper presents a new modeling approach and a novel path-following feedback control law for the cooperative transportation system consisting of two vehicles with articulation points at the centers of mass of their respective bodies. Virtual mechanical elements are newly incorporated for the conversion of the kinematical equation of the system into a canonical form, such as the chained form. Especially, the incorporation leads to the definition of degrees of freedom that do not physically exist in the real mechanical model. By constraining these non-existent degrees of freedom, it becomes possible to derive control inputs that conform to the real mechanical model while remaining based on the chained form, which facilitates well-structured control system design. The validity of the modeling approach and the path-following feedback control law has been verified through computer simulations.