Modeling of vehicle-passenger system for countermeasures to prevent passengers from falling over in a driver-less shuttle
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Summary
This paper addresses the safety challenge of preventing passenger falls in Level 4 driver-less shuttles, particularly for elderly users who constitute a significant portion of the target demographic in rural areas. While automated driving research often focuses on navigation and collision avoidance, this study targets in-vehicle accidents, which account for a substantial proportion of bus incidents and are frequently caused by sudden acceleration or deceleration. The authors propose a control strategy that manipulates the vehicle’s pitch angle to counteract inertial forces acting on standing passengers, thereby reducing the likelihood of falling. This approach utilizes a four-wheel-drive electric vehicle equipped with in-wheel motors, which allow for independent control of braking and driving forces on front and rear wheels to induce specific pitch motions. To derive the necessary control laws, the authors developed a mathematical model of the vehicle-passenger system. The vehicle is modeled using a half-car model that incorporates braking and driving forces, assuming the vehicle mass is significantly larger than the passenger mass. The equations of motion account for longitudinal displacement, vertical displacement, and pitch rotation, including the effects of suspension stiffness, damping, and "anti-dive" forces generated by the in-wheel motors. The passenger is modeled as a rigid inverted pendulum consisting of a mass point at the center of gravity, a massless bar, and a circular support area representing the feet. The stability of the passenger is evaluated using the Zero-Moment Point (ZMP); the distance between the ZMP and the center of the support area serves as an index for fall probability. The model calculates the inertial forces acting on the passenger due to vehicle acceleration, deceleration, and pitch dynamics. The study linearizes the nonlinear equations of motion under four assumptions: the total braking/driving force is a known input, vertical body displacement is negligible compared to the center of gravity height, pitch angles and their derivatives are small, and vertical acceleration is negligible compared to gravity. These simplifications allow the system to be expressed as a linear relationship between the front and rear wheel forces (inputs) and the passenger’s ZMP distance (output). The resulting linearized equations provide a foundation for designing a control law that adjusts the distribution of braking and driving forces to maintain the passenger’s ZMP within the stable support area, even during emergency braking scenarios. The significance of this work lies in its focus on passenger comfort and safety within automated shuttles, a critical factor for the adoption of autonomous mobility services by vulnerable populations. By demonstrating that pitch angle control via in-wheel motors can mitigate inertial forces, the paper provides a theoretical basis for active fall prevention systems. The authors conclude that this modeling framework enables the development of control strategies that can suppress passenger falls during sudden maneuvers, such as avoiding pedestrian collisions, thereby enhancing the overall safety profile of driver-less shuttles. Future work involves simulating and experimentally validating the derived control methods.
Provenance
The full processing record for this entry. Every stage of this paper's journey through the pipeline is logged — what ran, with which tool and model, how many attempts it took, and when it last completed. Discovered via author_sweep_intake on 2026-05-28.
| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | author_sweep | — | — | 2 | 2026-05-28 |
| archive | success | canonical_url | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-09 |
| extract | success | cached | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-09 |
| clean | success | clean | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-04 |
| chunk | success | chunk | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-04 |
| embed | success | embed | Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B | — | 1 | 2026-06-04 |
| enrich | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-05-28 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-04 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant | summ-v5 | 1 | 2026-06-09 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 15 | 2026-06-11 |
| verify | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-09 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-09; verification: verified.
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