The Rollover Risk and its Mitigation in Rickshaws

Although there are important efforts to electrify and diversify small vehicles, active safety on motorcycles and tricycles (also known as autorickshaw, tuk-tuk, mototaxi, etc.) has been relegated. For example, the electric tricycles marketed (and even internal combustion ones), don’t integrate an active safety system that prevents or mitigates the risk of rollover, despite how prone they are to such a situation; the concern for the increase in its commercialization is latent and unfortunately, there are very few scientific studies related. In this article, the obtaining and validation of a new rollover index for tricycles is presented and it is shown the effectiveness to predict and detect the risk even statically. In addition, a controller for the mitigation of the rollover risk and a Laplace-based stability analysis are presented, where the controller consists in performing a differential braking with the rear wheels; the effectiveness of the proposed strategy is illustrated with CarSim simulations.