Experimental Investigation of a Narrow Leaning Vehicle Tilt Stability Control System

One way of addressing traffic congestion is by more efficiently utilizing existing highway infrastructure. Narrow tilting vehicles that need reduced-width lanes can be part of the solution if they can be designed to be safe, stable and easy to operate. In this paper implementation and experimental investigation of a tilt stability control system for such a vehicle is presented. This control system is a combination of three different types of control schemes: steering tilt control (STC) system, direct tilt control (DTC) system and Tilt Brake system. The combined STC + DTC (SDTC) system is validated by running standard vehicle maneuver experiments such as turns and lane changes. The performance of the Tilt Brake algorithm is also verified for different brake switchover scenarios. Finally different experiment results are presented to demonstrate the effect of desired tilt angle definition on the handling of a narrow tilting vehicle.