Online Trajectory Planning for an Industrial Tractor Towing Multiple Full Trailers

This paper presents a novel solution for online trajectory planning of a full-size tractor-trailers vehicle composed of a car-like tractor and arbitrary number of passive full trailers. The motion planning problem for such systems was rarely addressed due to the complex nonlinear dynamics. A simulation-based prediction method is proposed to easily handle the complicated nonlinear dynamics and efficiently generate the obstacle-free and dynamically feasible trajectories. The vehicle dynamics model and a two-layer controller are used in the prediction. Implementation results on the real-world full-size industrial tractor-trailers vehicle are presented to validate the performance of the proposed methods.