Controller design for a semi-track air-cushion vehicle

To enhance the trafficability of semi-track air-cushion vehicle (STACV), a prototype is manufactured and a heirarchy controller is designed. The control objectives are, 1) to minimize the total power consumption; 2) to follow the driver’s commands and maintain the body attitude; 3) to assign and realize the generalized forces. The controller is proposed by using carefully designed controller configuration, neural network, Model Predictive Control (MPC) method, hybrid generalized extremal optimization (HGEO), etc. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed controller is verified by experiments under two typical operation conditions.