Development of active trailer steering systems for pickup truck-trailer combinations

Abstract

Lateral dynamics of articulated vehicles continue to remain a subject of concern in the design of safety systems. Vehicle-trailer combinations tend to exhibit low lateral stability and poor maneuverability, especially under high-speed maneuvers, which lead to unstable motion modes such as jackknifing, trailer sway and rollover. Active safety systems such as Active Trailer Steering (ATS) have been widely studied to address these issues and ensure the safety of combination vehicles. Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) is a popular control technique to design ATS systems. Although this technique has demonstrated consistent results, this controller is not effective in the presence of parametric uncertainties. Therefore, a robust control strategy is proposed to improve the overall dynamic performance of the system. This research focuses on designing an ATS system for pickup truck and tandem-axle trailer combinations using the LQR and robust H-infinity (H1) control techniques. Numerical simulations are carried out using TruckSim and MATLAB/Simulink software packages, and the results are analyzed under high-speed performance measures.