15th Triennial World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control
  Barcelona, 21–26 July 2002 
ENHANCED PATH PLANNING FOR ARTICULATED AND SKID STEERING MINING VEHICLES
Vladimir Polotski
NSERC Industrial Chair in Mining Automation, Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal
Phone 514 340-4711 ext 4175, FAX (514) 340-5802 email: polotski@ai.polymtl.ca

Autonomous guidance of the mining vehicle is based on the path tracking algorithms that make use of pre-calculated desired paths. These paths are often calculated without taking into account the nonholonomic nature of the vehicle motion. As a result the calculated path are not feasible and the path-tracking controller implicitly corrects the situation constructing a feasible approximation for feed-forward control terms. This decreases the overall performance of the guiding algorithm. In this paper we describe the path planning algorithms for articulated and skid steering vehicles that are often used in mining applications. We propose numerically stable procedure for computing off-line skidding and articulation angles. The results of these computations complement conventional path- planing procedures and improve significantly the path-tracking precision, thus constituting the low-cost enhancement for automation of mining vehicle autonomous guidance.
Keywords: numerical stability, autonomous guidance, path-planning
Session slot T-We-M06: Low Cost Oriented Industrial Automation/Area code 1f : Low Cost Automation