vehicle safety system designers

Abstract: Trailer sway is a persistent contributor to severe crashes among light passenger vehicles towing trailers, yet it remains largely unaddressed by the autonomous vehicle systems now entering this new era of automation. Improper cargo placement rearward of the trailer axle reduces, and can invert, the tongue load transmitted through the hitch. The resulting loss of vertical load at the tow vehicle's rear axle diminishes the lateral tire force available there and degrades yaw stability of the coupled system, admitting a divergent lateral oscillation of the trailer known as trailer sway. Under adverse combinations of speed and loading, this oscillation can progress to jackknifing, in which the articulation angle diverges rapidly and directional control is lost. This work develops a linear state-space model of the yaw-plane dynamics of a light vehicle-trailer combination, parameterized to expose tongue load as an explicit stability-determining quantity. From this model a linear quadratic regulator is synthesized to suppress articulation-angle divergence. Because consumer trailers carry no sensors, the two trailer states the controller needs, trailer yaw rate and articulation angle, are estimated by a Kalman filter from measurements taken only on the tow vehicle. The controller is then implemented and evaluated in a MuJoCo multibody simulation across a range of longitudinal speeds and tongue-load conditions, including the negative-tongue-load regime. Results show a significant decrease in trailer oscillation when controlling a given vehicle's steering with an LQR using tow-vehicle IMU and LiDAR data. These findings indicate that LQR controlled anti-sway systems are a viable control method for future autonomous vehicles.

Abstract: Motorized two-wheelers (MTW) dominate Indian roads but remain underrepresented in driver behavior research. This study presents the first large-scale analysis of MTW driver gaze behavior in naturalistic, heterogeneous urban traffic, using the \textit{myEye2Wheeler} dataset. A semantic segmentation pipeline (YOLOv11 + SAM2) was used to extract object-level gaze metrics under two attention modes: direct gaze (foveal overlap) and central vision (parafoveal monitoring). Results reveal a functional division: central vision supports broad monitoring, while direct gaze enables brief, selective sampling. Novice riders exhibit road-anchored scanning, returning to the road between object fixations, while experienced riders form longer chains of attention across multiple objects. The findings suggest that experience primarily refines temporal rhythm rather than altering allocation strategy and reduces object-class effects in gaze patterns. These findings offer new insight into MTW attention structures and inform future work on behavior modeling and safety systems.