A Wireless-Communication-Based Active Safety System for Articulated Heavy Vehicles

This paper presents an active trailer steering (ATS) system using a wireless communication link to facilitate exchanging information among vehicle units of articulated heavy vehicles (AHVs). A challenge for developing and implementing the wireless-communication-based ATS system is to address the problems of delay and packet-loss. Embedding wireless communication transceivers on an AHV may introduce delays for data exchange, and the transmitted data may be lost. Many reasons may lead to the delay and packet-loss, e.g., channel fading, noise burst, interference, etc. The proposed ATS system may prevent unstable motion modes of AHVs if the sensor data reach the controllers/actuators in real-time with an acceptable level of delay and packet-loss. In order to ensure the performance of the ATS control, a Kalman-filter-based estimator is introduced. The estimator uses the available dynamic data to estimate the current states of the AHV in case some sensor information is not available due to a delay or an outage in the wireless communication link. To investigate the effect of the time delay due to the wireless communication on the performance of the ATS control, co-simulations are conducted. The wireless network is modeled using TrueTime toolbox, the ATS controller is designed in SimuLink package, and the AHV model is constructed in TruckSim software. Integrating the wireless network modeled in TrueTime, the ATS controller designed in SimuLink, and the AHV model constructed in TruckSim leads to the co-simulation platform. Under the emulated double lane-change test maneuver, the effects of the wireless communication with two schemes on the direction performance of the AHV are examined.