A Control System for Hill Start Assistance for Commercial Vehicles

The topic of this paper is the design and analysis of a control strategy for a hill starting assistance for commercial vehicles equipped with an electric parking brake (EPB). The present hill start assistance system is thought to be installed in a vehicle with manual transmission and it is based on a very simple and low complexity hardware layout. The hill start strategy herein proposed is based on events detection: the detection of the torque transmission from the engine to the wheels and the detection the vehicle movement before the EPB -release. Although all the possible scenarios cannot be tackled, because of the layout constraints and of the presence of the driver in the control loop, the effectiveness of the proposed framework has been experimentally tested.