Virtual steering limitations for reversing an articulated vehicle with off-axle passive trailers

The paper reports on motion control for a non-holonomic vehicle pushing several passive trailers. To avoid inter-unit collisions, tractor steering limitations were successfully applied during forward motion in our previous work. Here, this approach is extended to the case of backward motion for off-axle trailers. To this end, the last trailer is considered to behave as a virtual tractor. Then, virtual steering is computed by applying any path tracking method for single non-holonomic mobile robots, incorporating limitations if necessary. Finally, kinematic relationships are used to translate motion commands to the actual tractor. The method has been validated experimentally with two heterogeneous off-axle trailers attached to the tracked mobile robot Auriga-¿.