Vehicle tip-over prevention using gain-scheduled State-dependent Riccati Equation-based anti-rollover controller

The most hazardous kind of vehicle crash among all road accidents is vehicle rollover. Present-day rollover prevention systems in commercial vehicles mitigate rollover by preventing any wheel lift-off from the ground. These systems make use of actuators such as differential brakes and demand all the wheels on the ground for satisfactory operation. Such systems are not effective in recovering a vehicle from intense rollover scenarios where the wheels on one side are lifted off the ground, and the vehicle is about to rollover to the other side after reaching the tip-over point. A few studies have investigated the possibility of reinstating a vehicle at the tip-over point with the wheels on a side lifted off. The high complexity and computation time of the optimal control strategies such as nonlinear model predictive controller make it unsuitable for real-time implementations. This study proposes a novel gain-scheduled State-dependent Riccati Equation-based optimal anti-rollover controller for reinstating a vehicle from the tip-over point. An inverted double pendulum on a cart vehicle model is used as the plant model. The anti-rollover controller is found to be presentable as a two-dimensional gain-scheduled lookup table with specific state dependencies in existence. It eliminates the necessity of solving the nonlinear performance index minimization problem online. State-dependent Riccati Equation method adequately accounts for the nonlinearities involved, yet possesses a small computational time per sample. The anti-rollover controller is evaluated with a 10 degrees of freedom full vehicle model with a nonlinear pure slip tyre model that incorporates the dynamical effects neglected in the controller formulation. Finally, the anti-rollover controller is evaluated in real-life initial conditions using a sophisticated pick-up truck model obtained from TruckSim(R)software through a co-simulation with the anti-rollover controller setup in MATLAB(R)/Simulink(R)environment. The State-dependent Riccati Equation controller was found to be effective in reinstating the higher-order models from the tip-over point in all the case studies conducted.

Automated summary

This study discusses the most hazardous type of vehicle crash - vehicle rollover, and the limitations of current rollover prevention systems in recovering vehicles from intense rollover scenarios. It introduces a novel optimal anti-rollover controller to reinstate vehicles from the tip-over point in such situations.