The reconfigurable vehicle (RV) can assemble and disassemble, which is an innovation to the traditional fixed configuration vehicle. The authors propose a concept of reconfigurable unmanned ground vehicle (RUGV), which consists of maneuvering modules (MM) and functional modules (FM) and can greatly broaden civilian unmanned vehicle application scenarios. The reconfiguration of RUGV is not only the connection of the mechanical system but also the control system. The traditional control strategy can not meet the variety of control systems and actuator topology resulting from reconfiguration, so it is necessary to research the reconfiguration control technology of the RV. Since the path tracking problem is a hot issue in the unmanned vehicle field, this paper investigates the reconfiguration control problem in path tracking. To this end, this paper proposes a reconfigurable platform of RUGV, which is composed of single-axle and two-wheel configuration MM called cell unit (CU). To express the different configurations of RUGV, a universal dynamic model (UDM) of RUGV is developed by a vectorized modeling approach. Based on this model, a game theory-based model predictive control (GMPC) path tracking controller is designed, whose sub-GMPC optimization problem is solved by Nash equilibrium game strategy. Numerous simulations are carried out to verify and compare the proposed strategy. The simulation results show that the GMPC can handle RUGV path tracking and speed tracking simultaneously and can also optimize lateral dynamics stability. By comparing with the holistic model predictive control (HMPC) strategy, the GMPC method has almost the same control performance but a shorter average single-step compute time. The proposed strategy also features greater flexibility in RUGV actuators’ topology changes as well as robustness against actuators’ faults.
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