Road vehicle rollover prevention torque vectoring via model predictive control

Conventional electronic stability control (ESC) system uses differential braking to stabilize the yaw rate and side slip of the vehicle motion. While the roll stability is critically important, it is absent from the current ESC scheme. In this paper, an model predictive control (MPC) scheme is proposed that potentially can achieve both yaw stability and roll stability. The objective of the proposed MPC algorithm is to track a reference yaw rate and body side slip angle, which serves the purpose of yaw stability control. Moreover, a rollover prevention constraint is imposed to achieve roll stability. The MPC optimizes the vehicle dynamics by stabilizing the yaw motion while observing the rollover prevention constraint, hence the yaw and roll stability can be achieved simultaneously. Moreover, it is found that the optimization results from MPC intentionally introducing larger slip angles into the system to avoid rollover, which is a somewhat counter-intuitive action. A high fidelity heavy-duty truck model from TruckSim is used for simulations and the effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated by the TruckSim and Simulink joint simulations.