Lateral Dynamic Model for Full-Size Semi-Trailer Container Trucks with Practical Evaluation

Vehicle dynamic model is essential for the control and simulation in autonomous driving. Compared to passenger cars that have been widely researched and applied, the modeling and evaluation of semi-trailer container trucks are less researched in the literature, and suffer from larger structure complexity and working condition variation. This paper proposes a 4-DOF and simplified 3-DOF dynamic models for semi-trailer trucks. Motivated by abundant real world data in various working conditions, the dynamic model is developed according to the trade-off between model complexity and accuracy. In low vehicle speed, the discretization error of solving differential equations can not be neglected, the model inference suffers from numerical instability, such as oscillation or divergence, which is a general problem. A stable and continuous model refinement method is proposed to deal with this problem. Evaluation is made for full-size semi-trailer container trucks using the real working data in Ningbo Zhoushan Port. Results show the effectiveness of the proposed model, which can be widely used in the autonomous driving system of semi-trailer trucks.