Real-time bus rollover prediction algorithm with road bank angle estimation

Abstract The bus rollover warning has achieved many progresses for researcher endeavors in the past decades. But these researches have not taken account for dynamic road bank. To fill up the gap, this paper presents a real-time rollover trend prediction to indicate bus rollover risk with road bank estimation. The prediction algorithm consists of a dynamic roll stability analysis, which is based on a suspended roll plane model, and a real-time warning velocity calculation. An estimator for the dynamic road bank and vehicle sideslip angle estimation using the dynamic simplex algorithm (DSA) is designed to take into account the influence of road bank on rollover trend. By comparing maximum stable lateral acceleration to the affordable lateral acceleration depending on the tire/road friction limit, a warning velocity is determined using the measurement of lateral acceleration and the estimate of instantaneous vehicle turning radius. The proposed rollover trend prediction algorithm is evaluated by TruckSim software. Simulation results show that the proposed warning velocity can represent the vehicle potential to resist rollover and give appropriate prediction of vehicle rollover crashes in typical scenarios.