AVOID-JACK: Avoidance of Jackknifing for Swarms of Long Heavy Articulated Vehicles

TL;DR

A purely reaction-based, decentralized swarm intelligence strategy tailored to automate elongated, articulated vehicles that prioritizes jackknifing avoidance and establishes a foundation for mutual collision avoidance is proposed.

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach to avoiding jackknifing and mutual collisions in Heavy Articulated Vehicles (HAVs) by leveraging decentralized swarm intelligence. In contrast to typical swarm robotics research, our robots are elongated and exhibit complex kinematics, introducing unique challenges. Despite its relevance to real-world applications such as logistics automation, remote mining, airport baggage transport, and agricultural operations, this problem has not been addressed in the existing literature. To tackle this new class of swarm robotics problems, we propose a purely reaction-based, decentralized swarm intelligence strategy tailored to automate elongated, articulated vehicles. The method presented in this paper prioritizes jackknifing avoidance and establishes a foundation for mutual collision avoidance. We validate our approach through extensive simulation experiments and provide a comprehensive analysis of its performance. For the experiments with a single HAV, we observe that for 99.8% jackknifing was successfully avoided and that 86.7% and 83.4% reach their first and second goals, respectively. With two HAVs interacting, we observe 98.9%, 79.4%, and 65.1%, respectively, while 99.7% of the HAVs do not experience mutual collisions.

Figures (9)

• Figure 1: Ackermann Truck-Trailer Model for HAV $i$. The truck (blue) and first trailer (black) are shown at the bottom right, while the final trailer $N_i$ is depicted at the top left. Intermediate trailers are omitted for clarity and indicated by a thick dashed line. For simplicity, the subscript $i$ is omitted from the variables.
• Figure 2: Translation of Vector to Ackermann Movement.
• Figure 3: Function for Jackknife Weight over Articulation Angle, see \ref{['eq:jackknife-weigt-func']}.
• Figure 4: Minimum stable circle of an example HAV. (blue: truck, black lines: trailers, arc: sub-arc of minimal circle).
• Figure 5: Trailer Count Distribution.

Theorems & Definitions (2)

• proof : Proof of \ref{['theo:jack']} using \ref{['sol:jack']}
• proof