Motion control to prevent passengers from falling over in an automated shuttle for mobility services

Katō, K.; Shimono, Keisuke; Hiraoka, Toshihiro; SUDA, Yoshihiro · 2020 · The Proceedings of the Transportation and Logistics Conference

DOI: 10.1299/jsmetld.2020.29.1502

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Summary

This study addresses the safety challenge of preventing passenger falls in Level 4 automated shuttles, particularly for elderly users who are more vulnerable to accidents. While automated driving technology is advancing, research on passenger comfort and safety in multi-passenger vehicles remains limited. The authors note that in conventional buses, a significant portion of serious accidents involve passengers falling inside the vehicle, primarily during acceleration and deceleration. To mitigate this, the paper proposes a motion control strategy that distributes braking and driving forces between the front and rear wheels of a four-wheel-drive shuttle equipped with in-wheel motors. By manipulating the vehicle’s pitch angle, the system aims to counteract the inertial forces acting on standing passengers, thereby reducing the likelihood of falls. The methodology employs a half-car model for the vehicle and a rigid-body inverted pendulum model for the passenger. The potential for falling is evaluated using the Zero-Moment Point (ZMP), specifically measuring the distance $P$ between the passenger’s support base center and the ZMP; a larger absolute value of $P$ indicates a higher fall risk. The control system utilizes a two-degree-of-freedom (2DOF) architecture comprising an optimum regulator as a state feedback controller and a feedforward controller derived from the system’s inverse model. The feedback gain is calculated to minimize the ZMP distance while maintaining the total required longitudinal force, and the feedforward gain is designed to achieve the desired pitch angle that neutralizes inertial effects. Numerical simulations were conducted using parameters based on the NAVYA ARMA shuttle, testing both linear and non-linear models under acceleration and deceleration scenarios. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control method. During acceleration, the control system induces a forward pitch by applying braking force to the front wheels and driving force to the rear wheels. This counteracts the rearward inertial force, reducing the ZMP distance $P$ from approximately 0.065 m (without control) to 0.02 m. During deceleration, the system induces a rearward pitch by driving the front wheels and braking the rear wheels, countering forward inertial forces. This reduced the ZMP distance from -0.145 m to -0.059 m. In both cases, the required control forces remained within practical limits (approximately 8,000 N for acceleration and 18,000 N for deceleration). The findings confirm that distributing braking and driving forces to control pitch angle significantly suppresses the ZMP deviation, thereby enhancing passenger stability. The authors conclude that this approach is viable for improving safety in automated mobility services and suggest future work on suspension parameter optimization and experimental validation using scale models.

Key finding

Distributing braking and driving forces between the front and rear wheels to control vehicle pitch angle effectively reduces the zero-moment point distance, thereby preventing standing passengers from falling over during acceleration and deceleration.

Methodology

simulation_modeling

Provenance

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Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-10; verification: verified.

Topics

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• passenger motion sickness comfort