摘要
An active trailer braking controller to improve the lateral stability of car-trailer systems is presented. The special and complex structures of these types of vehicles exhibit unique unstable motion behavior, such as the trailer swing, jack-knifing and rollover. These unstable motion modes may lead to fatal accidents. The effects of passive mechanical parameters on the stability of car-trailer systems have been thoroughly investigated. Some of the passive parameters, such as the center of gravity of the trailer, may be drastically varied during various operating conditions. Even for an optimal design of a car-trailer system, based on a specific passive parameter set, the lateral stability cannot be guaranteed. In order to improve the lateral stability of car-trailer systems, an active trailer braking controller is designed using the Linear Quadratic Regular （LQR） technique. To derive the controller, a vehicle model with 3 Degrees Of Freedom （DOF） is developed to represent the car-trailer system. A single lane-change maneuver has been simulated to examine the performance of the controller and the numerical results are compared with those of the baseline design. The benchmark investigation indicates that the optimal controller based on the LQR technique can effectively improve the high-speed lateral stability of the car-trailer system.
