The Impact of Attitude Feedback on the Control Performance and Energy Consumption in the Path-Following of Unmanned Rollers

The unmanned roller is one of the most popular construction vehicles, for which the accurate path-following is one of the most important control task. The dual-antenna Global Positioning System (GPS), usually mounted on the top of the cabin and the front drum separately, is used to approximately measure the position and heading direction at the contact patch between the wheel and the road. However, in the presence of large variation in the attitude of the roller, caused by the uneven construction site, there is bias in position and heading measurement due to the wobble of the roller. Obviously, this introduces several disturbances to the path-following control. In this paper, the Attitude Heading Reference System (AHRS) is used to measure the attitude information thereby corrects the position and heading of the roller measured by GPS only. The effects of such attitude-based correction on the path-following control performance of the unmanned roller are assessed in experiments by using a cascaded disturbance rejection structure. Results show that relative to the GPS only solution, the usage of attitude correction shows the following benefits, 1) reducing the positioning and heading error by 0.197m and 1.6° respectively; 2) improving the path-tracking accuracy by 64.8% and 36.2% in moving forward and backward respectively, 3) reducing the energy consumption of the steering motor by 27.47%.