Controller Design for Multi-Body Ground Vehicle Rollover Prevention Using Modified LQR Framework

This paper addresses the issue of control design for rollover prevention of a multi-body ground vehicle with army applications. The novelty of the approach lies in expressing the traditional rollover index as a quadratic performance index in Linear-quadratic regulator (LQR) design thereby integrating the roll over index directly and explicitly in the optimization procedure. The control gain obtained based on rollover performance index is more effective for rollover prevention than the gain obtained based on standard LQR design in which there is much ambiguity and labor involved in assigning the weights. The control gain obtained based on the proposed rollover performance index outperforms the standard LQR design, essentially because it introduces a cross coupling term between the state and control variables in the modified performance index. Thus, the proposed rollover prevention technique effectively incorporates the physical nature of the vehicle dynamics in the problem formulation resulting in significantly improved performance.Copyright © 2008 by ASME