Lateral Control of a Trackless Road Tram ‘ART’ Using Multi-axle Steering

Autonomous rail Rapid Transit (ART) is a novel trackless-tram urban transport system with high flexibility, capacity, and low implementation cost. All-axle steering capability brings additional control freedom to tackle the manoeuvrability, lateral stability, and off-tracking issues for such a long combination vehicle. This paper presents a lateral control approach with three levels: 1) Ackermann based feedforward; 2) articulation feedback; and 3) yaw rate feedback control. The relative contributions of these controllers are analysed with simulation, and the overall tracking and stability performance of the proposed controller is found to be satisfactory, even without parameters re-tuning for different operating conditions.