A Review of Car-Trailer Lateral Stability Control Approaches

Ensuring the lateral stability and handling of a car-and-trailer combination remains one of the challenges in safety system design and development for articulated vehicles. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art approaches for car-trailer lateral stability control. A literature review covering the effects of external factors, such as aerodynamic forces, tire forces, and road & climatic conditions, is presented. To address the effects of these factors, researchers have previously investigated numerous passive and active safety control techniques. This paper intends to identify the inadequacies of the passive safety approaches and analyzes promising active-control schemes, such as active trailer steering control (ATSC), active trailer braking (ATB) and model reference adaptive controller (MRAC). A comparative study of these control strategies in terms of applicability and cost effectiveness is performed.