In addition to jackknife, drivers of articulated vehicles have difficulties in surveying the rear part of the vehicle, which not only adds to the complexity of backward maneuvering but also endangers pedestrians and other road users. Vehicle mounted camera systems offer a solution for blind spot monitoring [29] and parking assistance [6,7]. Precisely, rear-view cameras have been employed to enhance driver perception in a truck and trailer [30,31].In spite of these steering and perception difficulties, not many works have focused on ADAS for articulated and multi-articulated vehicles. Feedback and feedforward control for a steered trailer can help the driver to reduce off-tracking in long trucks [13]. For passive trailers, a neural network predictor has been proposed to assist the driver in anticipating jackknife situations [32].

Furthermore, the ADAS proposed in [12] combines motion control with a driver interface to push homogeneous off-axle passive trailers with a reversed car. Recently, we proposed an ADAS system for backward maneuvers with off-axle trailers [33] that integrated the curvature limitations and virtual tractor concepts [34]. A further theoretical development has extended virtual tractor steering by addressing the difficulty of propagating set-points through on-axle hitches, which cannot be achieved directly [35,36].The major contribution of this paper is to complete [33] by incorporating [36] into a comprehensive drive-by-wire ADAS solution that is useful for reverse and forward maneuvers with combinations of on- and off-axle trailers.

Unsafe steering commands are prevented by conveying curvature limitations to the driver through a haptic steering wheel. In reverse, the handwheel and pedals can be used Batimastat as if the vehicle was driven from the back of the last trailer, i.e., a virtual tractor, with visual aid from a rear-view camera. This new ADAS has been implemented to tele-operate two different off- and on-axle combinations of a tracked mobile robot pulling and pushing a pair of dissimilar trailers.The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses the requirements for a multi-trailer ADAS. Section 3 describes the case study for a two-trailer robotic vehicle where the ADAS has been implemented, and discusses experimental results. Finally, Section 4 presents conclusions and future work.2.?Driver Assistance System RequirementsThis section discusses sensors and other hardware requirements for the multi-trailer ADAS. From the driver’s standpoint, the ADAS specifications are the following:It should allow forward and reverse driving with combinations of on- and off-axle trailers without the driver minding inter-unit collision or jackknife.The driver should be aware of curvature limitations through the steering wheel.