Joystick velocity control of the “High Performance Econo” vehicle

This paper concerns the joystick control of the the high performance econo vehicle developed by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries featuring 2 independent fully actuated steering wheels. For this purpose, we propose a velocity control law based on the assumption of pure rolling without slipping wheel/road contact and the techniques of dynamic feedback linearization. It allows the robot´s joystick control along 3 independent degrees of freedom: the longitudinal and lateral directions in the horizontal plane and the angular orientation about the vertical axis. Experiments on an asphalt road were performed at small speed which proved to be successful