Designing an Innovative Brake Control System

Abstract

Current trailers and caravans use overrun brakes, which cause overheated brakes in the mountains. A solution is to design an electric brake system in which the brakes are controlled electronically instead of mechanically. The report discusses the control models associated with braking, anti-sway detection and velocity sensor fusion. The RDW requires the force between the car and trailer to be regulated to zero within 0.6 seconds. The internal model based control method is used to design the controller. Test results show that the controller responds quick enough and is robust to disturbances. For the anti-sway detection, a calibration model is constructed that transforms the sensor data from the sensor’s reference frame to the trailer’s reference frame. Simulations with empirical data have verified the functionality of the calibration model. The angular yaw rate measured by a gyroscope can be used for anti-sway detection. A curve can be created that shows the relationship between the maximum allowed yaw rate and the velocity. In addition to that, an orientation model is constructed that can estimate the Euler angles and the gravity vector with a complementary filter. Consequently, the dynamic acceleration can be extracted obtained from the accelerometer. Several sensors are mounted to the E-Brake that can determine the velocity. A decentralised Kalman fusion filter is designed to estimate the velocity from the acceleration, velocity and GPS data.