Development and Experimental Evaluation of a Tilt Stability Control System for Narrow Commuter Vehicles

Abstract

This paper concentrates on development and experimental investigation of a compound control system designed for tilt stability of a narrow commuter vehicle. The control system is a combination of three different types of control schemes: Steering Tilt Control (STC) system, Direct Tilt Control (DTC) system and Tilt Brake system. These schemes utilize different types of actuators and offer complementary advantages over different ranges of operating speeds. The design of the control system is discussed. Then the combined STC-DTC system is first validated by running standard vehicle maneuver experiments such as turns and lane changes. The performance of the Tilt Brake algorithm is then verified for different low speed maneuvers. The feasibility of a stand alone DTC system is also experimentally investigated. Finally different experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effect of desired tilt angle definition on the handling of a narrow tilting vehicle.

Development of a tilt control method for a narrow-track three-wheeled vehicle

“…Recently, a similar combined system was presented by Kidane et al [12,13], together with experimental results. However, these were limited to time domain plots of standard manoeuvres at low frequencies.…”

Tilting-Type Balancing Mobile Robot Platform for Enhancing Lateral Stability

“…2(b), where the tilting motion is implemented usually by using parallelogram mechanisms. Most of the narrow tilting vehicles in [8]- [13] follow this type, because it is compatible with light weight vehicles.…”

“…The notion of lateral tilting has already been adopted frequently in the design of compact electric vehicles for individual transportation, which includes three wheelers [8]- [11] and four wheelers [12], [13], mostly in the convergence form of car and motorcycle. They require active roll control to make stable banked turns in cornering [8], [9].…”

“…They require active roll control to make stable banked turns in cornering [8], [9]. Unlike tilting trains, these narrow tilting vehicles make good use of the phase difference between the left and right two wheels to generate the roll motion.…”

The bricycle: a bicycle in zero gravity can be balanced or steered but not both

“…The controllers for NTVs tilt the vehicle using some combination of two strategies: (1) Direct tilt control: an actuator on the longitudinal axis of the NTV providing torque to tilt the vehicle [8]; (2) Steering tilt control: the steering angle applied by the driver is modulated to control the tilt angle using counter-steering. [9][10][11] The spring-righting on a bricycle is a special case of type (1) NTV control. Thus the problems with bricycle control, that we describe below, need to be circumvented in NTV controller design.…”