Sensor Reduction for Backing-Up Control of a Vehicle With Triple Trailers

This paper presents a cost-effective design based on sensor reduction for backing-up control of a vehicle with triple trailers. To realize a cost-effective design, we newly derive two linear-matrix-inequality (LMI) conditions for a discrete Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy system. One is an optimal dynamic output feedback design that guarantees desired control performance. The other is an avoidance of jackknife phenomenon for the use of the optimal dynamic output feedback controller. Our results demonstrate that the proposed LMI-based design effectively achieves the backing-up control of the vehicle with triple trailers while avoiding the jackknife phenomenon. More importantly, we demonstrate that the designed optimal control can achieve the backing-up control without, at least, two potentiometers that were employed to measure the relative angles (of a vehicle with triple trailers) in our previous experiments. Since the relative angles directly relate to the jackknife phenomenon, the successful control results without two potentiometers are very interesting and important from the cost-effective design point of view.