Reduction of Off-tracking Effects in an n-trailer Emulated through a Multi-agent Robot Mobile System

This paper proposes the emulation of the so-called kingpin mechanism in order to reduce the off-tracking effects exhibited by the standard and generalized n-trailer systems. In turn, both systems are emulated by a group of differential-drive mobile robots trough time-varying relative position vectors using the leader-follower scheme. A control law is proposed which involves the position of the virtual sliding kingpin mechanism. It is shown that when the virtual kingpin mechanism is used in the control law, the off-tracking effects are significantly reduced compared to when this virtual mechanism is not used. Numerical simulations and real-time experiments show the performance of the proposed control law.