Design of Fractional-Order Controller for Trajectory Tracking Control of a Non-holonomic Autonomous Ground Vehicle

A robust control technique is proposed to address the problem of trajectory tracking of an autonomous ground vehicle (AGV). This technique utilizes a fractional-order proportional integral derivative (FOPID) controller to control a non-holonomic autonomous ground vehicle to track the behaviour of the predefined reference path. Two FOPID controllers are designed to control the AGV’s inputs. These inputs represent the torques that are used in order to manipulate the implemented model of the vehicle to obtain the actual path. The implemented model of the non-holonomic autonomous ground vehicle takes into consideration both of the kinematic and dynamic models. In additional, a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is used to optimize the FOPID controllers’ parameters. These optimal tuned parameters of FOPID controllers minimize the cost function used in the algorithm. The effectiveness and validation of the proposed method have been verified through different patterns of reference paths using MATLAB–Simulink software package. The stability of fractional-order system is analysed. Also, the robustness of the system is conducted by adding disturbances due to friction of wheels during the vehicle motion. The obtained results of FOPID controller show the advantage and the performance of the technique in terms of minimizing path tracking error and the complement of the path following. © 2015, Brazilian Society for Automatics--SBA.