Abstract
The increase of the commercial vehicle traffic on our roads is the main reason of the development of enhanced electronically controlled systems. On the roads of Europe, the commercial traffic will be increased by about 60% within the next years. As a result the number of accidents will increase as well and traffic efficiency and traffic flow will suffer. Trucks will contribute over-proportionally to the accident numbers. In order to be able to control this growth and decrease - or better prevent - the number of accidents by reducing the gap between the dynamical behaviour of passenger cars and heavy vehicles, several systems will come to the market in the near future. These systems together will form an electronically controlled intelligent powertrain. This electronic control architecture is able to synchronize the different subsystems such as braking, steering, transmission, etc. This paper focuses on a control algorithm which is capable of intervening in the braking - including brake blending, as a part of the complex powertrain control, - steering and semi-active suspension control systems, which are existing sub-systems or are in late development phase. The intervention algorithm during different driving conditions is described. This paper also contains simulated as well as real test results showing the effect of the integrated chassis control in comparison with the state-of-the-art brake based ESP.
Keywords:vehicle dynamics, intelligent safety, chassis control, ESP, steer-by-wire