Development and Experimental Evaluation of a Tractor Roll-Over Stability Model

The roll-over stability is one of the main issues that affects agricultural tractors/machinery, and earth-moving machines operating in hilly or mountainous environments. Indeed, on average, it causes more than 100 fatal accidents every year in Italy due to tractor roll-overs. In the best cases, when operators are not or only minimally injured, they cause considerable damage to the vehicles as well as the loss of income from missed work. Creating stability models to study the behaviour of existing vehicles operating in hazardous conditions results very important in the designing phase as well as they can then be integrated into the vehicles control systems. In this work the results of a model for determining the stability of an agricultural vehicle moving on slope terrain is compared and validated through a series of experimental test. They have been accomplished exploiting an innovative rig for testing the stability of vehicles available at the Agro-Forestry Innovation LABoratory (AFILAB) of the Free University of Bolzano.