Two-layer mass-adaptive hill start assist control method for commercial vehicles

Abstract

This study aims to develop a two-layer mass-adaptive control framework to improve the hill start assist performance of commercial vehicles equipped with an electronic parking brake system. In the first layer, the desired pressure of the hill start assist control is proposed, then a logic threshold control method is employed to track the time-varying desired pressure. Due to the frequently changing load of the commercial vehicles, the second layer is utilized to estimate the vehicle mass online. The proposed mass-adaptive control method is evaluated via a co-simulation platform involving MATLAB/Simulink, TruckSim and AMESim, and is compared with a one-layer scheme without mass estimation. Finally, we further demonstrate the feasibility and robustness of the two-layer mass-adaptive hill start assist framework in vehicle experiments.