ADRC-Based Trajectory Tracking of Unmanned Tracked Vehicles Under High Slippage Disturbance

This paper presents an active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) strategy for the trajectory tracking problem of unmanned tracked vehicles (UTV) in the presence of high slippage disturbance dynamics. The proposed solution includes a step-by-step design of longitudinal and lateral control channels of the UTV to collectively handle uncertainties of the plant model and slippage disturbances. To conduct a detailed analysis of the proposed solution, a UTV motion model is considered with slippage dynamics caused by both curvature of the reference trajectory and the presence of variable coefficients of tracks-terrain traction. The obtained simulation results show that the ADRC-based UTV control achieves better trajectory tracking performances than the PI/PID control structure under different working conditions in the presence of high slippage dynamics and measurement noise.