VSS+: A NEXT-GENERATION PREDICTIVE VEHICLE STABILITY SYSTEM

Control of both manned and unmanned (i.e. autonomous or teleoperated) military vehicles is difficult for many reasons. As a result, vehicle accidents (most notably rollover) are one of the leading causes of casualty in Army operations (in manned vehicles) and disabling (in UGVs). While many advances have been made in the commercial passenger vehicle domain to improve vehicle safetyincluding technology such as adaptive cruise control, and roll/yaw stability controlsuch technology has not been introduced to military vehicles. This is due in part to the presence of outdated, legacy military technology, and the inability of COTS technology to meet rugged military specifications and operate reliably in harsh conditions. Also, while significant research advances have been made in the robotics domain related to vehicle sensing and control systems, the components used in this research are often non-robust and far too expensive for large-scale military adoption. Therefore, there exists a significant need to introduce vehicle stability enhancement technology to military vehicles. In this project, a low cost vehicle stability enhancement system (dubbed VSS+) will be developed that is applicable to a wide range of legacy vehicles of varying size and type. VSS+ will provide information to the operator (or onboard control systems) on vehicle stability in real time, and will have both reactive and predictive capabilities. It will be intended as a add-on functionality for retrofitting existing vehicles, and use standardized interface architectures and protocols such as CAN and AUTOSAR.