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A large percentage of commercial vehicles transport freight on our interstate highway system. These vehicles spend the vast majority of their duty cycle at high speed maintaining a lane. As steering is integrated into ADAS, objective performance measures of this most common mode of commercial vehicle operation will be required. Unfortunately in the past this predominant portion of the commercial vehicle duty cycle was overlooked in evaluating vehicle handling. This lanekeeping mode of operation is also an important, although less significant portion of the light vehicle duty cycle. Historically on-center handling was compromised to achieve acceptable low speed efforts. With the advent of advanced active steering systems, this compromise can be relaxed. Objective measures of lanekeeping are developed and performance of various advanced steering systems is quantified in this important operating mode.

Today's hydraulic steering systems suffer from poor efficiency due to their use of throttling valves to build pressure inside the steering gear. In this work, we propose a novel way to build and control pressure by controlling the flow from the pump and without throttling. As a result, such a system will be more energy efficient. Moreover, the ability to control pressure inside a steering gear, and thus assistance torque, allows the steering system to become an active closed-loop system rather than a passive open-loop system. Specifically, by controlling pressure, one can closely control the hand wheel torque the operator feels. Consequently, the new pressure control concept has the potential to not only significantly improve the efficiency of steering systems, but also offers the numerous benefits of torque overlay without the use of an electric motor.

With the expectation that means of redundant steering will be necessary for highly autonomous vehicles, different methods of providing redundant steering can be considered. One potential for redundancy is to steer the rear axle for directional control of the vehicle in the event of a failure in the primary steered front axle. This paper will characterize the dynamics of directional control of a three-axle vehicle when steered at the rear, and compare it to a conventionally steered three-axle vehicle. Several compensators are suggested that allow similar vehicle dynamic behavior when steering the rear axle as a driver would expect when steering the front, giving hope that a steerable rear axle can provide acceptable redundancy for a failed primary steering system on the front axle.

Self-steered or caster steered axles are commonly used to support load on multi-axle commercial vehicles. Such axles can allow more payload to be hauled in some vehicle configurations under the existing bridge formulas. These self-steered axles cannot generate a side load, and serve to unload surrounding fixed axles that do generate lateral forces to turn the vehicle with payload. Since the tire's ability to generate a side load is dependent upon its load, the use of caster-steered auxiliary axles can upset the balance (or the understeering) properties of the vehicle. This work will define the effect of adding a caster steered auxiliary axle and compare it with a steerable axle that positively controls the steer angle and thereby generates a lateral force. This work assumes the reader has a basic knowledge of the well publicized “bicycle” model, and particularly its extension to multi-axle vehicles.

A novel speed and position dependent Lane Keeping Assistance (LKA) control strategy for heavy vehicles is proposed. This LKA system can be implemented with any torque overlay system capable of accepting external position or torque commands. The proposed algorithm tackles the problem of lane keeping in two ways from a heavy vehicle's perspective. First, it stabilizes the vehicle's lateral position by bringing it to the center of the lane and giving it the correct heading to stay there. This is done using a speed and position dependent control strategy that becomes less aggressive as the vehicle's speed increases and as it gets closer to the center of the lane. Such speed and position dependency is especially critical in heavy vehicles where unnecessary aggressive control can lead to oscillations about the lane's centerline when cruising at high speeds.