Hardware-in-the-loop simulation of trajectory following control for a light armoured vehicle optimised with particle swarm optimisation

Naturally, the unmanned armoured vehicle is important in military missions and to minimise the casualty of military personnel. Steering control is one of the most important aspects of unmanned vehicles. Therefore, in this research, a trajectory following control from Stanley autonomous vehicle is employed and optimised for a light armoured vehicle (LAV) to follow a pre-defined trajectory. The proposed controller is developed on a validated armoured vehicle model which consists of a 7-degree-of-freedom handling model and other vehicle interactions. To study the controller's behaviour with respect to each parameter, the sensitivity analysis was carried out. The controller is then optimised using particle swarm optimisation (PSO) algorithm and then tested on a physical Pitman arm steering actuator system through hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) simulation. It was shown that the PSO-tuned Stanley controller is able to automatically steer the vehicle to follow the pre-defined path with an average lateral cross-track error of 0.26 m.