DRAFT Journal of Field Robotics (regular paper) Special issue for selected papers from the Field and Service Robotics conference, July 2007 Accepted March 2008 DRAFT Version Robust trajectory tracking for a reversing tractor-trailer system C´ edric Pradalier and Kane Usher CSIRO ICT Centre, Autonomous Systems Laboratory, PO Box 883, Kenmore QLD 4069, Australia, Email: firstname.lastname@csiro.au Corresponding author: C´ edric Pradalier Abstract Tractor-trailer reversing is a classical non-linear control problem in which many of the solutions proposed in the litera- ture perform poorly in the presence of real-world constraints such as steering angle, rate limits and lags. In this paper we describe a new method in which an inner loop controls the hitch-angle of the trailer creating a virtual articulated vehicle to which existing control techniques can be applied. We provide an analysis of the stability and convergence properties of this control approach, as well as experimental results which illustrate the robustness of this approach to model estimation errors, low-level control loop dynamics, and other disturbances introduced by, for example, state estimation errors.