Delay-Compensated MPC for Path Tracking of Articulated Steering Vehicles

Articulated steering vehicles are key equipment for mining transportation, underground roadways, and heavy-duty material handling infrastructure, where insufficient path-tracking accuracy may reduce roadway safety margins and increase the risk of lane encroachment, collision, and traffic interruption in confined haulage corridors. Hydraulic actuator delay is a practical source of steering lag in such vehicles, but it is often simplified or neglected in existing path-tracking control studies. To address this gap, this study develops a delay-compensated model predictive control (MPC) framework by incorporating experimentally identified hydraulic actuator delay into the pre‍dictive control model. Simulation results showed that MPC provided better stability performance than linear quadratic regulator (LQR), reducing sideslip angle, yaw rate, and lateral acceleration by 21%–48% under representative lane-change maneuvers. With actuator-delay compensation, the proposed MPC further reduced the tractor lateral deviation by 53.12% under single lane change (SLC) and 83.63% under double lane change (DLC) conditions. These results indicate that the proposed method can improve the operational safety, tracking reliability, and automation readiness of articulated vehicles used in mining and infrastructure transportation scenarios.