Design and experimental evaluation of a novel sliding mode controller for an articulated vehicle

This article presents the design and experimental evaluation of a novel sliding mode control scheme, being applied to the case of an articulated vehicle. The proposed sliding mode controller is based on a novel continuous sliding surface, being introduced for reducing the chattering phenomenon, while achieving a better tracking performance and a fast minimization of the corresponding tracking error. The derivation of the sliding mode controller relies on the fully nonlinear kinematic model of the articulated vehicle, while the overall stability of the control scheme is proven based on the Lyapunov's stability condition. The performance of the established control scheme is being experimentally evaluated through multiple path tracking scenarios on a small scale and fully realistic articulated vehicle.