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Electric vehicle (EV) has been regarded as not only an effective solution for environmental issues but also a more controllable and responsible device to driving forces with electric motors and precise torque measurement. For electric vehicle equipped with four in-wheel motors, its tire longitudinal forces can be generated independently and individually with fully utilized tire adhesion at each corner. This type of the electric vehicles has a distributed drive system, and often regarded as an over-actuated system since the number of actuators in general exceeds the control variables. Control allocation (CA) is often considered as an effective means for the control of over-actuated systems. The in-vehicle network technology has been one of the major enablers for the distributed drive systems. The vehicle studied in this research has an electrohydraulic brake system (EHB) on front axle, while an electromechanical brake system (EMB) on rear axle.

The evaluation of electric vehicle electric/electronic-architectures (e/e-architectures) is the main topic of this paper. The electric vehicle is chosen as an example system, as it reflects the typical challenges of modern vehicle e/e-architecture development. The development of modern automotive technology also presents another important trend - vehicle electrification. New electric and electronic devices are developed and required in the automotive industry and control commands are exchanged by electric and electronic ones. The energy storage systems (ESS) properly reflect the above two aspects. The energy storage device also takes care of the peak loads, the high load dynamics, and it utilizes the braking energy in order to increase the efficiency. In this work a Li-ion battery and an ultracapacitor both are considered as energy storage devices.

Adaptive cruise control system with lane change assistance (LCACC) is a novel advanced driver assistance system (ADAS), which enables dual-target tracking, safe lane change, and longitudinal ride comfort. To design the personalized LCACC system, one of the most important prerequisites is to identify the driver’s individualities. This paper presents a real-time driver behavior characteristics identification strategy for LCACC system. Firstly, a driver behavior data acquisition system was established based on the driver-in-the-loop simulator, and the behavior data of different types of drivers were collected under the typical test condition. Then, the driver behavior characteristics factor Ks we proposed, which combined the longitudinal and lateral control behaviors, was used to identify the driver behavior characteristics. And an individual safe inter-vehicle distances field (ISIDF) was established according to the identification results.

Simulation has been considered as one of the key enablers on the development and testing for autonomous driving systems as in-vehicle and field testing can be very time-consuming, costly and often impossible due to safety concerns. Accurately modeling traffic, therefore, is critically important for autonomous driving simulation on threat assessment, trajectory planning, etc. Traditionally when modeling traffic, the motion of traffic vehicles is often considered to be deterministic and modeled based on its governing physics. However, the sensed or perceived motion of traffic vehicles can be full of errors or inaccuracy due to the inaccurate and/or incomplete sensing information. In addition, it is naturally true that any future trajectories are unknown. This paper proposes a novel modeling method on traffic considering its motion uncertainties, based on Gaussian process (GP).

Performance testing and evaluation always plays an important role in the developmental process of a vehicle, which also applies to autonomous vehicles. The complex nature of an autonomous vehicle from architecture to functionality demands even more quality-and-quantity controlled testing and evaluation than ever before. Most of the existing testing methodologies are task-or-scenario based and can only support single or partial functional testing. These approaches may be helpful at the initial stage of autonomous vehicle development. However, as the integrated autonomous system gets mature, these approaches fall short of supporting comprehensive performance evaluation. This paper proposes a novel hierarchical and systematic testing and evaluation approach to bridge the above-mentioned gap.

As one of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), automatic parking system has great market prospect and application value. In this paper, based on an intelligent vehicle platform, an automatic parking system is designed by using multi-point preview theory. The vehicle kinematics model was established, based on Ackermann steering principle. By analyzing working conditions of parallel parking, complex constraint condition of parking trajectory is established and reference trajectory based on sine wave is proposed. In addition, combined with multi-point preview theory, the design of trajectory following controller for automatic parking is completed. The cost function is designed, which consider the trajectory following effect and the degree of easy handling. The optimization of trajectory following control is completed by using the cost function.

In order to improve drivers’ acceptance to advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) with better adaptation, drivers’ driving behavior should play key role in the design of control strategy. Adaptive cruise control systems (ACC) have many factors that can be influenced by different driving behavior. It is important to recognize drivers’ driving behavior and take human-like parameters to the adaptive cruise control systems to assist different drivers effectively via their driving characteristics. The paper proposed a method to recognize drivers’ behavior and intention based on Gaussian Mixture Model. By means of a fuzzy PID control method, a personalized ACC control strategy was designed for different kinds of drivers to improve the adaptabilities of the systems. Several typical testing scenarios of longitudinal case were created with a host vehicle and a traffic vehicle.

Although advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) have been widely introduced in automotive industry to enhance driving safety and comfort, and to reduce drivers’ driving burden, they do not in general reflect different drivers’ driving styles or customized with individual personalities. This can be important to comfort and enjoyable driving experience, and to improved market acceptance. However, it is challenging to understand and further identify drivers’ driving styles due to large number and great variations of driving population. Previous research has mainly adopted physical approaches in modeling drivers’ driving behavior, which however are often very much limited, if not impossible, in capturing human drivers’ driving characteristics. This paper proposes a reinforcement learning based approach, in which the driving styles are formulated through drivers’ learning processes from interaction with surrounding environment.

Since steering wheel torque feedback is one of the crucial factors for drivers to gain road feel and ensure driving safety, it is especially important to simulate the steering torque feedback for a driving simulator. At present, steering wheel feedback torque is mainly simulated by an electric motor with gear transmission. The torque response is typically slow, which can result in drivers’ discomfort and poor driving maneuverability. This paper presents a novel torque feedback device with magnetorheological (MR) fluid and coil spring. A phase separation control method is also proposed to control its feedback torque, including spring and damping torques respectively. The spring torque is generated by coil spring, the angle of coil spring can be adjusted by controlling a brushless DC motor. The damping torque is generated by MR fluid, the damping coefficient of MR fluid can be adjusted by controlling the current of excitation coil.

Due to growing interest in automated driving, the need for better understanding of human driving behavior in uncertain environment, such as driving behavior at un-signalized crossroad and roundabout, has further increased. Driving behavior at roundabout is greatly influenced by different dynamic factors such as speed, distance and circulating flow of the potentially conflicting vehicles, and drivers should choose whether to leave or wait at the upcoming exit according to these factors. In this paper, the influential dynamic factors and driving behavior characteristics at the roundabout is analyzed in detail, random forest method is then deployed to predict the driving behavior. For training the driving behavior model, four typical roundabout layouts were created under a real-time driving simulator with PanoSim-RT and dSPACE. Traffic participants with different motion style were also set in the simulation platform to mimic real driving conditions.

A vehicle dynamics stability control system based on integrated-electro-hydraulic brake (I-EHB) system with hierarchical control architecture and nonlinear control method is designed to improve the vehicle dynamics stability under extreme conditions in this paper. The I-EHB system is a novel brake-by-wire system, and is suitable to the development demands of intelligent vehicle technology and new energy vehicle technology. Four inlet valves and four outlet valves are added to the layout of a conventional four-channel hydraulic control unit. A permanent-magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) provides a stabilized high-pressure source in the master cylinder, and the four-channel hydraulic control unit ensures that the pressures in each wheel cylinder can be modulated separately at a high precision. Besides, the functions of Anti-lock Braking System, Traction Control System and Regenerative Braking System, Autonomous Emergency Braking can be integrated in this brake-by-wire system.

With rapid increase of vehicles on the road, safety concerns have become increasingly prominent. Since the leading cause of many traffic accidents is known to be by human drivers, developing autonomous vehicles is considered to be an effective approach to solve the problems above. Although trajectory tracking plays one of the most important roles on autonomous driving, handling the coupling between trajectory-tracking control and ESP under certain driving scenarios remains to be challenging. This paper focuses on trajectory-tracking control considering the role of ESP. A vehicle model is developed with two degrees of freedom, including vehicle lateral, and yaw motions. Based on the proposed model, the vehicle trajectory is separated into both longitudinal and lateral motion. The coupling effect of the vehicle and ESP is analyzed in the paper. The lateral trajectory-tracking algorithm is developed based on the preview follower theory.

Steering torque feedback, or steering feel, is widely regarded as an important aspect of driver interface to road feel. To generate a steering feel with the appropriate level of fidelity required by a driver-vehicle system or a driving simulator, it is essential to gain a good understanding of various important influencing factors of steering torque feedback. This paper presents a comprehensive study and analysis of internal and external factors that strongly affect steering torque feedback. A steering torque feedback model with sufficient fidelity is established and verified as the base for this study. The individual- and collective-level influences of these factors on steering torque feedback are analyzed in both time domain and frequency domain, with guidelines provided on how to properly use these influencing factors to control their negative effects in modeling steering torque feedback.