Autonomous driving trailer trucks play an extremely important role in transporting goods at ports, factories, and logistics centers. Trajectory tracking is the core part of achieving unmanned driving control, and excellent trajectory tracking control can ensure the safety of trailer trucks and improve transportation efficiency and reduce labor costs in factories or ports. Due to the coupling relationship between the tractor and semi-trailer, ordinary semi-trailers can only control their trajectory by adjusting the front wheel steering angle of the tractor, which makes the difficulty of trajectory tracking control of trailer trucks relatively high. In response to this trajectory tracking problem, this paper establishes a dynamic equation for trailer trucks with rear wheel steering capabilities and proposes a trajectory tracking control method based on model predictive control to control the front wheel steering angle of the tractor and the rear wheel steering angle of the semi-trailer. Finally, a joint simulation platform of Simulink and TruckSim is established to verify the effectiveness of the control algorithm. The limitation of this paper is that the algorithm was not thoroughly validated using real vehicle control, but relied solely on computer simulations that cannot fully simulate the real environment's impact on vehicles. Most other studies focus on ordinary trailer trucks that are difficult to control as a whole. This article establishes dynamic and kinematic equations for trailer trucks with rear wheel steering capabilities and implements kinematic control. This greatly improves the accuracy of trajectory tracking control. This paper addresses the kinematic and dynamic characteristics of trailer trucks with rear wheel steering capabilities by establishing kinematic and dynamic models that accurately describe the trailer trucks' kinematic and dynamic characteristics. Additionally, this paper designs a trajectory tracking control method based on model predictive control that uses the front wheel steering angle of the tractor and the rear wheel steering angle of the semi-trailer as control inputs. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that the performance of the controller meets the requirements of trajectory tracking for trailer trucks with rear wheel steering capabilities.

Prof. Dr. Hongyu Zheng, Professor, State Key Laboratory of Automotive Simulation and Control, Jilin University