  Stabilizing multi-steered articulated vehicles in backward motion is a
complex task for any human driver. Unless the vehicle is accurately steered,
its structurally unstable joint-angle kinematics during reverse maneuvers can
cause the vehicle segments to fold and enter a jack-knife state. In this work,
a model predictive path-following controller is proposed enabling automatic
low-speed steering control of multi-steered articulated vehicles, comprising a
car-like tractor and an arbitrary number of trailers with passive or active
steering. The proposed path-following controller is tailored to follow nominal
paths that contains full state and control-input information, and is designed
to satisfy various physical constraints on the vehicle states as well as
saturations and rate limitations on the tractor's curvature and the trailer
steering angles. The performance of the proposed model predictive
path-following controller is evaluated in a set of simulations for a
multi-steered 2-trailer with a car-like tractor where the last trailer has
steerable wheels.
