Improving Off-Road Vehicle Lateral Stability with ICC

Off-road vehicles are prone to loss of control accidents. Electronic stability control (ESC) systems are becoming more prevalent in the market to address this area of concern. Stand-alone ESC systems have proven to reduce loss of control accidents. Recently, integrated chassis control (ICC) systems have emerged, showing promising results. This study investigates the integration of an active rear steering (ARS) system with rear differential braking (RDB) on an off-road vehicle. The ARS and RDB were integrated with a sliding mode controller (SMC). Three reference models were compared, each with its own integration rule and empirically tuned gain. Double lane change manoeuvres were simulated with each configuration on smooth and rough roads to evaluate their performance. Results indicate that the kinematic model reference error performs better than the phase plane location error, the SMC gain depends on the terrain and that using the rear axle slip angle as the integration rule gives good results. Using the rear axle slip angle as an ARS-RDB integration rule resulted in a control system with good path-following ability and limited loss of speed.