As construction vehicles become electrified and more intelligent, some technologies are increasingly being applied in optimal controlling vehicle dynamics and driving behavior. Manned articulated vehicles in underground mine have drawbacks such as high steering energy consumption and harsh working environment for drivers, which can be solved by above techniques. The distributed-drive articulated vehicles (DDAV) can generate the yaw moment by the reasonable allocation of each wheel driving force, which can reduce the energy consumption by assisting the hydraulic steering system in steering.
In this paper, the dynamic programming (DP) is used to study the optimal torque distribution while the vehicle following the reference path with minimizing the energy consumption. Firstly, combined with the tentacle algorithm, optimal control inputs and energy consumption of the vehicle were derived from DP under each tentacle. Then, under limited vehicle states, a look-up table containing the alternative tentacle set and optimal control strategy is formulated to transform the offline DP results into the vehicle’s online controller. Finally, experiments based on Robot Operating System (ROS) are designed to verify that the method proposed in this paper can complete the automatic driving of DDAV in underground mine and reduce the energy consumption of DDAV.