A cost effective method of rollover mitigation in vehicles is presented. The method was designed so that some of the system states were measured by sensors that are already available on most vehicles and so that other states could be measured with relatively low cost sensors. Also, the control algorithm was designed to be implementable using a series of look up tables and computationally efficient equations to enable the use of low-cost controller platforms. These look up tables and equations can be modified to change the conservativeness of the method as well as to configure the method for use on almost any 4-wheeled vehicle. Lastly, the proposed mitigation technique was designed to be directly implementable with existing vehicle hardware.
To develop this method, a vehicle model was created using several advanced computer packages including SolidWorks 2008™, MATLAB ®, Simulink ®, and SimMechanics™. Once created, the model was outfitted with virtual sensors that represent data from realistic sensor types. A detection algorithm was designed around the hypothesis of a stability boundary utilizing the sensor data to detect impending rollover. Finally, a mitigation algorithm was designed to limit throttle and braking upon impending rollover. This algorithm was defined using the basic principles of end-stop control, but was adapted to work appropriately with this scenario. To conclude this research, two simple maneuvers were used to verify the effectiveness of this system to mitigate vehicle rollover.
This research was government sponsored and in some instances utilized secured data. Due to the nature of this material, some data has been omitted from this document.
