Active Steering and Anti-Roll Shared Control for Enhancing Roll Stability in Path Following of Autonomous Heavy Vehicle

Rollover accident of heavy vehicle during cornering is a serious road safety problem worldwide. In the past decade, based on the active intervention into the heavy vehicle roll dynamics method, researches have proposed effective anti-roll control schemes to guarantee roll stability during cornering. Among those studies, however, roll stability control strategies are generally derived independent of front steering control inputs, the interactive control characteristic between steering and anti-roll system have not been thoroughly investigated. In this paper, a novel roll stability control structure that considers the interaction between steering and anti-roll system, is presented and discussed. The proposed control framework is implemented based on dynamic game theory in which heavy vehicle roll stability can be represented as a dynamic difference game so that its two players, namely the active steering (AS) and active anti-roll bar (AARB) system, can work together to provide more roll stability to the heavy vehicle system during cornering. The interactive control strategy between AS and AARB system is obtained by non-cooperative closed-loop feedback Nash game equilibrium theory to ensure optimal roll stability performance. In order to validate the effectiveness of proposed control strategy in a more comprehensive way, a ℋ_∞ optimal roll stability control strategy in which the input of AS is only regarded as the exogenous disturbance, is also presented and used as comparison. Simulation results of double lane change (DLC) maneuver show that the proposed AS-AARB shared control strategy can significantly improve the roll stability as well as lateral stability while ensure desired path tracking performance during cornering.