Rollover Prevention of Multi-Body Ground Vehicles Extending LQR Design for Control Coupled Output Regulation

In this paper, a novel control system analysis and design technique is presented by transforming rollover index minimization as an optimal control problem in the popular Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) control design framework. This results in a ‘control coupled output regulation’ problem because of the coupled terms in state and control variables in the performance index. There are no guidelines available for the selection of state and control weightings for the coupled case. In this paper, we present considerable insight into the major differences in the optimal control problem formulation for the uncoupled and coupled cases and provide guidelines for weight selections by taking into consideration the interaction (or coupling) between state and control terms and using the property of ‘Output Zeroing’ controller. The proposed analysis and design method is illustrated with rollover prevention control for a multi-body Ground Vehicle using the active steering control and active roll control respectively.