Brake-actuated steering for Heavy Goods Vehicles

The use of articulated heavy good vehicles (HGVs) for road freight is common in many countries due to their flexibility and transport efficiency. However, conventional HGVs with no trailer steering lack the manoeuvrability to access onto minor roads and urban areas with narrow streets and roundabouts. Thus, smaller vehicles are required in these circumstances and this negatively affects the efficiency of the overall transport system.
Active trailer steering systems help improve the manoeuvrability and hence road access for articulated HGVs. This project on trailer steering systems seeks to investigate the poor manoeuvrability, tyre wear and road damage associated with the use of conventional articulated vehicles. Moreover, by improving the directional performance of the vehicle, larger and higher-capacity vehicles can be widely adopted with following benefits in terms of efficiency, better traffic management and a significant reduction in emissions and fuel consumption.
This project will build upon previous work conducted in the Cambridge Vehicle Dynamics Consortium (CVDC), which has focused on developing path-following steering control algorithms and several generations of steering hardware. These were developed and applied to a variety of HGV configurations, namely tractor-semitrailers, B-doubles and European Modular System (EMS) configurations.
The aim of this research is to reduce the weight and cost of the steering hardware through investigating a new steering concept and associated software control strategy. Hardware-in-the-loop testing of the designed hardware and control strategies, as well as field trials of full-scale instrumented vehicles will be performed to validate the predicted performance of the system.