A practical approach to feedback path control for an articulated mining vehicle

This paper proposes a feedback path controller for an articulated load-haul-dump (LHD) mining vehicle. First, we develop a kinematic model of the vehicle in error coordinates expressed in a moving reference frame, which is partially linked to the vehicle. We give a change of coordinates and input combined with a new variable instead of the time-index that transform the original system into a form that can be viewed as a perturbation of a nominal linear time-invariant system. The nonlinear term in the perturbed system satisfies a linear growth bound. Subsequently, linear control feedback is applied to the full nonlinear system and local exponential stability of the closed-loop perturbed system is achieved. Simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.