Development and Evaluation of an Experimental Platform for Steered Axles of Long Combination Vehicles

Long Combination Vehicles (LCVs) require different strategies in controlling lateral dynamics of the combinations to ensure optimal paths followed by the trailers. Steering more than one axle of the combination has been developed in previous works and now needs to be verified in real vehicle tests. This work thus developed an experimentation platform incorporating a rapid-prototyping system to provide the possibility of evaluating these algorithms on vehicle level. In this paper the solution is detailed as a Hardware-in-the- Loop (HiL)-platform linking a vehicle dynamics frame-work with two steered axles. In accordance with the automotive development process after the V-model, this allows to safely verify the functioning of both software and hardware before performing track-tests of the fully integrated system with all units of a LCV. This paper outlines the development and capabilities of the resulting experimental platform and gives a short example of its performance in a standard-maneuver, which is also used to proof the validity between simulation and HiL-environment enabling full system testing on vehicle level