Off-tracking bounds for a car pulling trailers with kingpin hitching

Presents fundamental calculations that are used in a new method for planning motion among obstacles for a mobile robot system configured as a car pulling many trailers with non-standard kingpin hitching. In the special case of equal length kingpin hitches, the authors show exponential convergence of the off-tracking of the trailers, and compute an upper bound on the off-tracking of the trailers and kingpin hitches. The path planning method then only needs to plan a collision-free path for an “enlarged” lead car, and the rest of the vehicle will follow without hitting the obstacles. Simulation results are presented for a car pulling a single trailer and three trailers