Automating Commercial Heavy Vehicles

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Automating Commercial Heavy Vehicles

While Advanced Vehicle Control and Safety Systems (AVCSS) research for passenger cars has been going on for over a decade, commercial heavy vehicles (CHVs) have started receiving some attention only over the last few years. CHV operation is being considered as one of the first fields where the deployment of Automated Highway System (AHS) technologies may be practicable. The commercial benefits of automation make AHS technologies appealing to commercial fleet operators. Trucks can reap more significant benefits from automation than passenger cars, because they spend much more time on the road, they are operated for profit by professionally trained drivers, and they are generally much more expensive to purchase and maintain. The ratio of the cost of automating a commercial vehicle to the vehicle's overall cost is also much lower than the ratio for passenger cars. Moreover, reducing driver stress is of great importance in commercial operation. Because commercial drivers spend significantly more time behind the wheel than drivers of passenger cars, reducing driver stress is directly related to increasing highway safety.

Fleet operators could dramatically reduce their costs through cooperative scenarios like the so-called "electronic towbar," where two or three driverless automated vehicles follow one manually driven vehicle, while at the same time providing a safer and more comfortable working environment for their drivers. The technical requirements for the implementation of such an electronic towbar scenario include include lateral control (keeping a vehicle in its lane, following the road), and longitudinal control (keeping a vehicle traveling at a predetermined speed, without colliding with vehicles ahead of or behind it). PATH, funded by Caltrans, has been supporting two parallel projects on heavy vehicle automation for the past five years. One focuses on lateral control, under the direction of Professor Tomizuka at UC Berkeley, and one on longitudinal control, under the direction of Professor Kanellakopoulos at UCLA. After an initial period of theoretical development, the two groups have now moved into the phase of experimentally validating their results. These experiments, summarized in the following articles, use an 18-wheel Freightliner FLD120 Class-8 tractor, generously on loan from Freightliner Corporation, and a 45-foot-long (13.5 m) Great Dane trailer purchased by PATH, which have been fully equipped with electronic throttle, brake, and steering actuators, and corresponding sensors for fully automated operation.

For complete article, see Intellimotion 7.4 (850K PDF File)

Research reports on this topic:

Lateral Control of Heavy Duty Vehicles for Automated Highway Systems
Meihua Tai, Jen-Yu Wang, Pushkar Hingwe, Chiech Chen, Masayoshi Tomizuka
UCB-ITS-PRR-98-8 (1.7MB PDF File)

Longitudinal Contro of Heavy Duty Vehicles: Experimental Evaluation
Diana Yanakiev, Jennifer Eyre, Ioannis Kanellakopoulos
UCB-ITS-PRR-98-15 (660KB PDF File)

Analysis, Design, and Evaluation of AVCS for Heavy-Duty Vehicles with Actuator Delays
Diana Yanakiev, Jennifer Eyre, Ioannis Kanellakopoulos
UCB-ITS-PRR-98-18 (2.9MB PDF File)