A novel tripped rollover prevention system for commercial trucks with air suspensions at low speeds

This paper presents a novel system to avoid tripped rollovers at low-speed operations for commercial vehicles with air suspension systems. This is of particular significance since truck rollovers have become a serious road safety problem, which usually lead to severe injuries and fatalities. Several active anti-rollover systems have been proposed in the past two decades; however, most of them focus on untripped rollover prevention instead of the tripped rollovers. Up to now, very few pieces of literature discuss the approaches that are used to avoid tripped rollovers of trucks. Furthermore, the air suspension is widely used for commercial vehicles, thus it provides an opportunity to prevent rollovers when properly manipulated. Therefore, a novel tripped rollover prevention system is proposed for trucks at low-speed operations with air suspensions. A roll dynamics model with an air spring is built to investigate the dynamic behavior and the time response of the whole system. More importantly, the feasibility of this new anti-rollover system is discussed and verified by the co-simulations in TruckSim and MATLAB/Simulink under two possible tripped rollover conditions.