Event-triggered tube-based model predictive anti-rollover control for liquid tank trucks considering time-varying parameters

Abstract

Liquid tank trucks, primarily used for transporting hazardous chemicals, pose a high rollover risk due to the coupled dynamics of sloshing liquid and vehicle motion, and their rollover incidents can lead to severe safety hazards. The liquid sloshing introduces time-varying parameters that challenge the design of anti-rollover controllers. In response to this, this paper proposes an event-triggered, tube-based model predictive anti-rollover control strategy for liquid tank trucks that accounts for time-varying parameters. Firstly, to capture the time-varying characteristics resulting from liquid sloshing, this paper establishes a linear parameter-varying model. After analyzing the influence of liquid sloshing and time-varying parameters on rollover, a time-varying rollover index of the liquid tank truck is obtained using a parameter-state joint estimator for estimating difficult-to-obtain states and time-varying parameters. Then, this paper proposes a tube-based model predictive anti-rollover control strategy, which enhances the robustness of the control strategy to time-varying parameters in liquid tank trucks by incorporating system time-varying parameters within the tube. Furthermore, due to the limited bandwidth of the chassis CAN communication, an event-triggered mechanism is introduced to reduce communication resource consumption. Finally, this paper developed a hardware-in-the-loop anti-rollover test platform to validate the proposed strategy. The test results demonstrate that, under the proposed control strategy, the rollover angle of the liquid tank truck decreased by 35 %, and the lateral acceleration was reduced by 50 %. Additionally, the communication resource occupancy decreased by 39 %. The proposed anti-rollover control strategy effectively reduces the rollover risk and enhances the driving safety of liquid tank trucks.