2014-217 – Online Identification of Vehicle Mass Properties for Rollover Prevention

Numerous electronic driver aids have been developed and sold for consumer automobiles – and they are potentially applicable to all vehicles. The more common ones include cruise control, antilock brakes, and electronic stability control (ESC). ESC often includes one or both of directional stability control (DSC) and attitude stability control (ASC). ASC refers to the use of inertial or other sensors to: a) detect when a vehicle is approaching a rollover event and, b) warn the operator and/or take corrective action. The present invention addresses the fact that: a) some sophisticated implementations of ASC require knowledge of the location of the vehicle center of gravity (cg), b) the cg may move, c) there is no known way to measure that movement directly. The cg location changes if mass (i.e. passengers, luggage, fuel) is added, removed, or moved on the vehicle. If the ASC is implemented using conservative assumptions, it means vehicle performance is a1tificially limited. If it uses liberal assumptions, it can lead to accidents, even fatalities. The present invention differs from present technology in that: a) it estimates the changes in the cg location, b) while it can do so using measurements of force at the wheels or deflections of the suspension, it can also do so using no additional sensing at all beyond the sensing that is already needed to implement an ASC system. Meghan Hayes meghanh@andrew.cmu.edu 412-268-1241