Improved adaptive steering controller for combined vehicles

If the dynamics of combined vehicles such as tractor-semitrailer varies greatly, it may be very difficult for inexperienced drivers to achieve good handling stability. Moreover, once combined vehicles become unstable, it is very difficult for all drivers to stabilize vehicles. However, if the behavior of actual combined vehicles can track a designed desired combined vehicle, the good handling property can be maintained even when the dynamics of actual combined vehicles varies large. To achieve handling performance better than the conventional control schemes, the authors have proposed the adaptive steering controller. However, in this conventional scheme, the method to improve tracking performance can not be guaranteed theoretically. Therefore, the trial and error method is required in order to improve robust handling performance. In this paper, to overcome this problem, the authors propose a new adaptive steering controller.