Safety Performance and Robustness of Heavy Vehicle AVCS

The results of the project both underscore the importance of considering roll and provide some encouraging insight into the performance of existing PATH control schemes. By using the lane change maneuver methodology proposed in MOU 390, different control gains that produce comparable lane tracking behavior can be shown to produce vastly different roll responses. Thus consideration of roll excitation is indeed an important criterion for the development of heavy truck lateral controllers. Furthermore, the ability to discriminate among these controllers provides support for the lane change maneuver as an effective tool for evaluating vehicle roll effects. Most encouragingly, there exist choices of gains within the existing PATH control scheme that produce low levels of vehicle roll. Thus, while roll has not been explicitly considered in previous work, there appears to be sufficient flexibility within the control scheme to ensure that roll dynamics are not heavily excited. The simulation study did not find any cases where the existing control structure could not be tuned to provide acceptable tracking and safety.