Path following hybrid control for vehicle stability applied to industrial forklifts

The paper focuses on a closed-loop hybrid controller (kinematic and dynamic) for path following approaches with industrial forklifts carrying heavy loads at high speeds, where aspects such as vehicle stability, safety, slippage and comfort are considered. The paper first describes a method for generating Double Continuous Curvature (DCC) paths for non-holonomic wheeled mobile robots, which is the basis of the proposed kinematic controller. The kinematic controller generates a speed profile, based on “slow-in” and “fast-out” policy, and a curvature profile recomputing DCC paths in closed-loop. The dynamic controller determines maximum values for decelerations and curvatures, as well as bounded sharpness so that instantaneous vehicle stability conditions can be guaranteed against lateral and frontal tip-overs. One of the advantages of the proposed method, with respect to full dynamic controllers, is that it does not require dynamic parameters to be estimated for modelling, which in general can be a difficult task. The proposed kinematic-dynamic controller is afterwards compared with a classic kinematic controller like Pure-Pursuit. For that purpose, in our hybrid control structure we have just replaced the proposed kinematic controller with Pure-Pursuit. Several metrics, such as settling time, overshoot, safety and comfort have been analysed.