Collaborative Trajectory Planning and Tracking Control for Wind Turbine Blade Mountain Transport Vehicles

This paper investigates collaborative trajectory planning and tracking control for semi-trailer-mounted lifting vehicles used in wind turbine blade transport on complex mountainous roads. The proposed approach addresses the challenging problem of coordinating the articulated chassis with a three-degree-of-freedom upper operating device during ultra-long blade transport. First, a unified kinematic model of the articulated chassis and the three-degree-of-freedom upper operating device is established for collaborative trajectory planning and tracking control under low-speed transport conditions. In addition, a dynamic formulation is provided to describe the inertial coupling characteristics of the vehicle-blade system. Second, a continuous trajectory planning method driven by task gradients is proposed to generate collision-free trajectories satisfying multiple constraints, including kinematic feasibility, obstacle avoidance, and actuator limits. A damping injection strategy is introduced to improve numerical conditioning during the iterative optimization process. Third, a linear time-varying model predictive controller is designed based on local linearization along the reference trajectory, which handles system constraints explicitly and achieves high-precision trajectory tracking. Simulation and hardware-in-the-loop experiments show that the proposed method generates smooth and feasible trajectories, while the tracking controller achieves engineering-level position accuracy and joint-angle tracking errors below 3 degrees, satisfying practical requirements for wind turbine blade transport on mountainous roads.