Brake-actuated steering control strategy for turning of articulated vehicles

Abstract

The use of high-capacity vehicles has been shown to significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions from heavy goods transport and improve the efficiency of the transport sector. Despite their benefits, current legislations regarding the dimensions and weight of the vehicles have limited the widespread use of heavier and longer vehicles. Long vehicles are less manoeuvrable and often necessitate technological interventions to pass manoeuvrability tests. Various rear-steering systems proposed to solve these issues lead to high costs and mass penalties compared to standard fixed axles. This paper presents a new steering concept which utilises the axles’ existing brake actuators to steer, eliminating the need for dedicated actuators on the axle and associated steering hardware. Brakes are individually controlled on each side of a freely steerable axle to generate the necessary torque about the kingpins causing it to steer. A validated vehicle model is used to design a feedback steering strategy based on path-following steering control for low-speed manoeuvring. The proposed system's performance is compared to conventional vehicles and current state-of-the-art active-steering systems through simulations. It demonstrates comparable steering performance to that of electro-hydraulic active-steer systems, with an estimated 50% reduction in both mass and costs.