Improved Adaptive Cascade Predictive Control for Trajectory Tracking of a Crawler Hydraulic Drill-Anchor Robot with Slippage Compensation

In the complex operational environment of coal mine shafts, trajectory tracking control of crawler hydraulic drill-anchor robots is susceptible to track slippage and internal–external uncertain disturbances, leading to low tracking accuracy. This issue hinders the implementation of efficient and precise coal mine roadway support operations. To address these challenges, enhance the automation level of coal mine roadway support, and improve operational safety and reliability, research on high-precision trajectory tracking control for crawler hydraulic drill-anchor robots is imperative. Therefore, this paper takes crawler hydraulic drill-anchor robots as the research object and focuses on the trajectory tracking control of such robots. First, a kinematic model incorporating track slippage was established for the crawler hydraulic drill-anchor robot. Second, a cascade predictive control strategy is proposed. The upper-layer trajectory tracking control adopts an adaptive model predictive controller, which adjusts controller weights according to tracking error variations and provides reference rotational speeds for the lower-layer predictive controller. Simulation results of linear and sinusoidal trajectory tracking show that the proposed strategy can effectively compensate for the effects of track slippage and improve trajectory tracking accuracy. Finally, a friction-compensated predictive control method was designed to regulate the rotational speeds of the left and right track drive wheels, and the proposed method achieves optimal control performance with a minimum MEAE of 0.12292 rpm, SDAE of 0.44366 rpm, ITAE of 4.9168, MEACI of 3.0607 mA, SDACI of 1.2497 mA, and ITACI of 122.4283. This performance is significantly superior to that of the conventional PID, ADRC, and MPC methods, thereby realizing high-precision track speed control.