Sliding mode control of longitudinal motions for underground mining electric vehicles with parametric uncertainties

Nowadays, zero-emission electric vehicles become more and more attractive personnel transport vehicles for mining industry. Owing to the special working environment and complex road conditions, a robust controller needs to be designed to achieve a stable and reliable vehicle system for underground mining electric vehicles (UMEVs). This paper first presents the UMEV model with system uncertainties. Then, a new controller based on the sliding mode control (SMC) is designed for UMEVs to track the longitudinal velocity while maintaining longitudinal slip ratio in a desired linear region in the presence of the bounded system uncertainties. The comparison of the simulation results for both the proposed SMC controller and a traditional SMC controller shows that the proposed SMC controller has a better performance for the long-distance up/down slopes with varying rolling resistance coefficients.