Trajectory tracking control of tracked vehicles considering nonlinearities due to slipping while skid-steering

In many applications, mobile vehicles operate over rough terrains to handle certain tasks and missions. Therefore, they are designed with tracks to deal with such irregular surfaces. Motion control and steering of tracked vehicles under the influence of slipping while skidding are still an interesting topic for many specialists and researchers and need further investigation. In fact, modelling and control of skid-steered tracked vehicles with slipping are very challenging. In this paper, various control schemes are proposed to investigate the closed-loop dynamical performance of tracked vehicles using different desired trajectories. Three control strategies are formulated and tuned to handle the undesirable effect of slipping while skidding: (i) robust nonlinear controller, (ii) speed compensation-based fuzzy logic controller, and (iii) speed compensation-based proportional–integral controller. The proposed control schemes are designed to explore new methods of skid-steering control with slipping. Preliminary simulation results are introduced to verify the effectiveness of the proposed controllers, using different desired trajectories, and to demonstrate the feasibility of utilizing such controllers.