Investigation of ION and a Heavy Truck on Rollover Propensity and Prevention

In this paper rollover propensities of two different kinds of vehicles, a big truck and a small vehicle, are compared by simulations. The small vehicle model is built for ION, the off-road navigator from OSU team in DARPA Grand Challenge and the large truck model is a generic example from TruckSim database. Characteristic parameters for ION model are tuned to match a real situation in which one wheel lift-off happened. An integration of two prevailing anti-rollover control methods, namely active suspension control and differential braking, is applied on the model of ION for rollover prevention. Simulations are given to show the privilege of the integrating control method compared with each separate controller. The influences of road curvature, or the steering input and the travel speed on the roll propensity are analyzed and compared for these two vehicles. The results show that vehicle roll dynamic can be predicted to match that of the real driving case and the proposed control method effectively improves the roll stability both for ION and the heavy truck.