Active disturbance rejection control of unmanned tracked vehicle

Significant improvement of the unmanned vehicles possibility has achieved by increasing its autonomy, i.e. by excluding the human operator from the guidance loop. In this paper is considered the autonomous control of the unmanned tracked vehicle (UTV) in the presence of the unknown caterpillar tracks slippage. The longitudinal and lateral control model for the UTV path following problem are developed. To handle unknown uncertainties and slippage disturbances, the design of active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) for both, longitudinal and lateral control channels, are proposed. ADRC strategy is enabled that all the control channel uncertainties and disturbances are treated as one lumped (total) disturbance, which is defined as an extended system state and estimated by appropriate extended state observer (ESO). Further, applying the appropriate closed-loop control laws, based on the total disturbance estimation, the complex longitudinal and lateral control problems are reduced to disturbance-free model control. The numerical simulations for the different path following scenarios and caterpillar tracks slippage dynamics are given to verify effectiveness of the proposed UTV control.