"Improving Safety, Comfort and Efficiency of Convoy Vehicles Through Novel Preview Control"

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Ride quality, active safety and energy efficiency of convoy vehicles will be improved through the use of preview-controlled active suspensions. Both ride quality and roadholding of actively-suspended vehicles (i.e., with a force actuator in the suspension system) can be improved by sensing the road ahead of the vehicle and using this information in a preview controller. Instead of vulnerable look-ahead sensors mounted on the front bumper of the vehicle, the overall response of the preceding vehicle(s) is proposed as a means to generate preview controller information for followers. In our proposed research controllers will be designed and simulated to assess performance, stability and robustness. Physical implementation will be done using reduced-scale vehicle hardware. Active suspensions also reduce the longitudinal energy lost to vertical suspension motion, thereby potentially reducing vehicle energy consumption. The reduction for vehicles with preview-active suspension and intelligent cruise control will be quantified through simulation. The use of lead-vehicle-as-sensor will then be applied to yaw and roll dynamics to improve handling and ride quality during cornering. Contributions to the research community include novel control schemes, robust estimators of difficult-to-measure vehicle states, and insight into energy interactions among vehicle system elements. This research is important to the military, which deploys trucks in closely-spaced convoys where the terrain can be highly variable and the drivers young and inexperienced. Ride quality improvements reduce fatigue and injury, while roadholding improvements increase maneuverability and stability. Fuel savings are important for efficient military deployments. Fuel consumption and emissions are major concerns associated with heavy trucks, and widespread environmental and economic benefits will result from their reduction. Improved vehicle-to-vehicle communication could eventually allow communication of lead-vehicle-as-preview information to warn followers of road obstacles, thereby benefiting not only convoy vehicles, but also the general driving public.