Contents 1 Introduction
Over the past few decades, tractor-trailer vehicles have become widely available and continuously received numerous attentions owing to its high security, large cargo capacity and simple structure, see e.g. [1]–[4], and the reference therein. However, the efficient control of this kind of vehicle is still a challenging problem for control community. At the first place, if the tractor-trailer vehicle is forced to track an arbitrary reference trajectory given by earth-fixed frame, it suffers from underactuated and nonholo-nomic constraint simultaneously. In terms of this sophisticated vehicle system, several previous studies have focused on various control methods to implement trajectory tracking. For example, the earlier work was developed for a car-trailer system to design the system controller for parallel parking the vehicle in [1]. Whereafter, Yang et.al, established the dynamic model for the investigated tractor-semitrailer, and then the sliding mode control (SMC) was employed to improve the control performance [5]. Recently, Khalaji et.al, studied the trajectory tracking problem for tractor-trailer vehicle, in addition to augmenting the vehicle to a multi-trailers [3]. These investigations achieve satisfactory control performance but finding an appropriate Lyapunov candidate is indeed a difficult matter. Then, few scholars devote to applying model predictive control (MPC) to synthesise control system since MPC uses rolling optimal algorithm instead of searching positive Lyapunov function [6]–[8]. Motivated by these references, this paper attempts to employ MPC control to tackle the underactuated and nonholonomic problems for tractor-trailer vehicle.
