Research on Steering Control of Multi-Axle Steering Heavy Commercial Vehicle Based on Reducing Tire Wear

This article proposes a new multi-axle steering vehicle (MSV) kinematics model to improve the tire wear of multi-axle heavy commercial vehicles while ensuring driving safety. The MSV kinematics model is based on the Ackerman steering geometry, which properly distributes the tire steering angles of each axle to cause the tractor unit and the trailer unit of the multi-axle heavy commercial vehicle to steer around the same steering center. In order to compensate for the influence of the factors such as the slip angle of each tire, the adjustment parameter K is introduced to reasonably adjust the relationship between the steering wheel angle input and the tire steering angles of each axle of the trailer unit. The adjustment parameter K makes the trajectory of the trailer unit of the MSV accurately follow the trajectory of the tractor unit of the MSV without changing the trajectory of the tractor unit. In order to verify the validity of the proposed model, the co-simulation of circular motion was carried out under the condition of Matlab/Simulink and TruckSim, and the tire wear was analyzed by taking the combined tire force of the longitudinal force and the lateral force. The simulation results show that compared with front-axle steering vehicle (FSV), the tire wear of the trailer unit of the MSV is reduced by more than 30%, which indicates that the proposed multi-axle steering angle distribution method can greatly improve the tire wear of multi-axle heavy commercial vehicles.