Search Results

The development of commercial vehicles demand a rigorous and relatively expedient integration and validation to be performed in order to have the vehicle delivered to a satisfied customer. In today's market, the end customer often request for vehicles with various customizations and requirements for vocational performance, such as load and fuel economy. These requirements often run into conflict with vehicle dynamics fundamentals such as ride and handling. Examples of such concern are vocation bodies that do not have weight distributed unevenly or even ones that bias the static load distribution of the vehicle such that ride and handling are affected because of change in bounce, roll and pitch natural frequencies. One tool that can be used to develop and evaluate vehicle response to provide guidance for production vehicles is multibody dynamics. Unlike the passenger car industry, no two trucks rolling down the assembly line are necessarily the same.

Forward collision mitigation systems (FCMS) are becoming standard in passenger car vehicles with the current trend of safety technologies development. Currently, safety systems are on the road towards widespread acceptance in the commercial vehicle industry. Whereas the full Electronic Stability Control (ESC) system attempts to sense the states of the vehicle to assist the driver to maintain directional control of the vehicle, current FCMS attempts to sense the environment around the front of the vehicle and either warns the driver to react or intervenes by slowing down the vehicle autonomously. Some of the latest developments in FCMS for commercial vehicles will be discussed, together with an outlook of future systems. This study will also examine some of the common scenarios that forward collision mitigation systems can be beneficial in, especially for commercial vehicles. The scenarios will be investigated using Hardware-in-loop-simulation, and the results discussed.

Recently, the development of various driver assistance systems into today's vehicle have increased due to the availability of affordable advanced electronics. With this increase in electronic content on today's commercial vehicles, various opportunities for sensor fusion are opened up, primarily because the sensors are typically part of the ECU cluster, and always measuring either driver input, vehicle states and potentially the environment around the vehicle. Given the larger variance in vehicle mass and length for commercial vehicles, as opposed to passenger cars, sensor data integrity and robustness is important to assure that all the sensors are reporting the same information, so that safety-critical Driver Assistance Systems can intervene effectively and robustly.