The aim of this paper is to describe a longitudinal control strategy with an Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) system for heavy trucks, using an engine torque management technique. There are more problems correlated to heavy trucks longitudinal control strategies than in passengers cars, mainly due to cargo load variations, to actuators built-in saturations and delays, which significantly complicate the control task. Hence the ACC controller has been designed to be robust over a wide range of vehicle operating conditions such as weight and road gradient variations. The ACC control method developed in this paper is based on a simplified model-based representation of a truck, that overcomes all complexities due to nonlinear vehicle dynamics. This Adaptive Cruise Control system has been installed on a IVECO Cursor 10 Heavy Truck.
Abstract