Adaptive robust control of unmanned tracked vehicles for trajectory tracking based on constraint modeling and analysis

A novel trajectory tracking control problem based on constraint modeling and analysis is addressed by the way of constraint-following control for the unmanned tracked vehicle in this paper. The unmanned tracked vehicle system contains time-varying uncertainty which is possibly swift but bounded, and the bound is possibly unknown. First, the coupled dynamics model of unmanned tracked vehicle is established. By taking into account the kinematic characteristics, it makes the motion control of unmanned tracked vehicles more precise. Meanwhile, a 3D virtual prototype model is established for the unmanned tracked vehicle. Second, for the control objective of trajectory tracking, the related problem is converted into a constraint-following problem, and an adaptive robust control is therefore proposed based on this for the controlled unmanned tracked vehicle system to satisfy the trajectory tracking constraint. Finally, it is proved that the controlled unmanned tracked vehicle system can achieve accurate trajectory tracking with the proposed adaptive robust control, even under the interference of complex time-varying uncertainties. Modeling accurate dynamics and trajectory tracking constraints for unmanned tracked vehicles and designing an adaptive robust controller to realize accurate motion control for unmanned tracked vehicles even under strong external disturbances are the main contributions of this paper.