This paper proposed the mathematical modelling of multi-body non-linear dynamics of an armed vehicle with weapons, designing several sliding mode-based controllers, including the fuzzy logic-based adaptive controller, against the external effects of standard road disturbance, and comparatively investigating the performances of the controllers. Firstly, the physical and dynamic design parameters of the system are determined as military standards, the equations of motion of the system are derived, and a multi-degree-of-freedom vehicle with a weapon dynamics model is obtained. Later, to ensure stable and robust control of the system under disturbances and uncertainties, the conventional sliding mode controllers with different sliding surfaces are developed alongside the fuzzy adaptive fast integral terminal sliding mode controller, whose parameters are adjusted based on the angular position error. Multiple standardized military road profile data are applied as external disturbances, and the simulation studies are performed to achieve high-precision control of the weapon’s elevation and azimuth angles by considering the limitations of system parameters and standards. Unlike most existing, this study addresses an adaptive framework that integrates fuzzy logic into a fast integral terminal sliding mode control that has received limited use in vehicle systems by considering a full multibody vehicle model with realistic military parameters and road profiles. The comparative simulation results on the system demonstrate that the proposed controller ensures superior robustness performance with fast convergence and better tracking by not requiring parameter reconfiguration.
Şen et al. (Wed,) studied this question.