Safety-Guaranteed Oversized Cargo Cooperative Transportation With Closed-Form Collision-Free Trajectory Generation and Tracking Control

In this article, the trajectory generation and motion control of autonomous driving oversized cargo cooperative transportation systems (CTS) in static but bounded environment is investigated. Different from common vehicle systems, the challenges lie on the safety-guaranteed cooperation of independently controlled carriers with inherent connections brought by the rigid payload, which results in complex system dynamics and multiple time-variant uncertainties. A constraint-oriented “leader-follower” modeling and control framework is introduced, and a trajectory generation method based on the diffeomorphism is creatively proposed to generate closed-form collision-free trajectory for the payload in the bounded environment. To achieve safety-guaranteed trajectory following under uncertainties, a transformed adaptive robust control strategy (TARC) is designed through constraint relaxation, and the coordination of the carriers is realized. An implementation with comprehensive ablation studies demonstrates the effectiveness of our trajectory generation and tracking control framework. The collision-free trajectory set is efficiently generated, and the CTS can be kept strictly inside the safe corridor with high tracking accuracy, which is extremely hard for the baseline methods.

I. Introduction

Oversized cargo transportation has been applied in many fields of industries such as construction, manufacturing and energy. When the payload is too large or heavy for one carrier to transport, multi-vehicle cooperative transportation systems (CTS) are used to “move large object with relative small agents” [1], as shown in Fig. 1. However, it is difficult for human drivers to coordinate with each other due to the hard connections between the vehicle carriers and the payload, resulting in problems of transportation safety and efficiency. In the past few years, the prosperity of automation technology has inspired researchers to develop autonomous CTS [2], [3]. It is expected that the self-driving capability has the potential of increasing the transportation efficiency and avoid potential accidents [4]. Fig. 1.

Multi-vehicle cooperative transportation of oversized cargo.