Developing a cost-effective test system for evaluating dynamic performance of articulated heavy vehicles

In this paper, a three-level test system is proposed to comprehensively and accurately evaluate the dynamic performance of the whole articulated heavy vehicles from the perspective of the third party. At the sensor level, a reduced sensor configuration scheme is adopted to decrease the overall cost. At the fusion level, a group of parallel extended Kalman filters are developed to fuse the information from the sensors to accurately obtain the kinematical parameters of the observed points on the articulated heavy vehicle. At the evaluation level, taking full advantage of the geometry constraint and kinematics relationship, a calculating module is designed to determine the position, velocity, and azimuth of any vehicle unit of the articulated heavy vehicle. Furthermore, an assessing module is developed to evaluate the dynamic performance comprehensively, which includes a set of proposed inferring algorithms to automatically ascertain a series of attributes related to the dynamic performance. Finally, the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed test system are validated through simulation and real field tests.