Enhancements of armored vehicle stability using adaptive controller

In the military vehicle application, it is a well-known fact that the armored vehicle will lost its directional stability once the armored vehicle is in lateral direction using large caliber gun while in a dynamic condition. This is because the gun recoil force acting at the center of weapon platform produces unwanted yaw moment at the body center of gravity of the armored vehicle. Recently, most of the military vehicles need to be in static condition during firing. Besides having reduced mobility, firing in static condition can cause the armored vehicle to be easily targeted for counterattack by the enemies. In order to overcome this problem, an active safety system namely Yaw Disturbance Rejection Control (YDRC) is proposed in this study. The proposed active safety system is used to improve the handling performance and maintain the directional stability of the vehicle by providing correctional steering angle to the Pitman arm steering mechanism. The steering correction is intended to reject the unwanted yaw motion and re-position back the armored vehicle back to its intended direction of travel path after firing. In this study, the proposed YDRC system is designed based on two outer loops namely Firing-On-the-Move (FOM) and Active Front Wheel Steering (AFWS). These outer loop control designs are developed to improve vehicle dynamic stability performance in terms of handling responses and directional path of the armored vehicle. The YDRC system is tested in both simulation and experimental studies using a prototype armored vehicle namely Half Scale SIBMAS. For simulation, YDRC system is tested on a validated 15 DOF armored vehicle via Softwarein-the-Loop (SIL) simulation. Then, the performance of the YDRC system is enhanced using Neuro-PI controller by updating the Neural Network controller parameters based on back propagation gradient training algorithm. In order to evaluate the advantages of adaptive Neuro-PI controller experimentally, Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) simulation is performed using Pitman arm steering in prototype Half Scale SIBMAS using various testing criteria. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed YDRC is evaluated on actual firing test via Real Implementation Test Scenario (RITS) using Half Scale SIBMAS based on critical firing condition. It can be noted that the lateral motion is improved up to 65% while the yaw response is improved almost 50% from conventional armored vehicle.