Rollover prevention system of truck-trailer vehicle using steerable-wheel for middle axle

It is well-known that single-trailer trucks are one of the common vehicles in transporting goods. Normally, single-trailer truck will lose its manoeuvrability when driving at a high speed during cornering or sudden lane changing manoeuvers due to excessive yaw and roll moments at the body center of gravity. In order to enhance the manoeuvrability as well as to avoid rollover accident in high speed manoeuverings, this study proposes an active roll control using steerable-wheel system middle axle of single-trailer truck. The steerable-wheel system is developed mainly focused to maintain the directional manoeuvrability and stability of the single-trailer truck by providing an electronically controlled wheel angle of middle axle mechanism. The system is designed to reject the unwanted lateral, yaw and roll motions based on trailer responses. Firstly, the control structure of the active roll control system is developed on a verified 18 degree-of-freedoms of single-trailer truck model. The control structure consists of trailer’s roll angle feedback control using PID controller and additional roll moment cancellation control using Skyhook controller. The controller is then enhanced by optimising the controller’s parameters using Particle Swarm
Optimisation. From the simulation results, it can be seen that the proposed control structure is able to reject the unwanted motions in single-lane and double-lane change
manoevers as compared to passive system. The benefits of PID-Skyhook controller are also discussed in this study by comparing the performances against the PID controller.
Finally, active roll control with PID-Skyhook controller is then tested experimentally through hardware-in-the-loop simulation approach using a small-sized of single-trailer
truck with steerable-wheel test rig. From the experimental results, a significantly good agreement between experiment and simulation is observed for lateral acceleration, yaw
rate and roll angle responses. It also shows that the proposed steerable-wheel system was proven managed to reduce the unwanted lateral, yaw and roll motions by producing the appropriate wheel steer angle for middle axle to maintain the manoeuvrability and stability of the single-trailer truck from rollover accident.