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Safety and minimal transit time are vital during transportation of essential commodities and passengers, especially in winter conditions. Icy roads are the worst driving conditions with the least available friction, leaving valuable cargo and precious human lives at stake. The study investigates the available friction at the tire-ice interface due to changes in key operational parameters. Experimental analysis of tractive performance of tires on ice was carried out indoor, using the terramechanics rig located at the Advanced Vehicle Dynamics Laboratory (AVDL) at Virginia Tech. The friction-slip ratio curves obtained from indoor testing were inputted into TruckSIM, defining tire behavior for various ice scenarios and then simulating performance of trucks on ice. The shortcomings of simulations in considering the effects of all the operational parameters result in differences between findings of indoor testing and truck performance simulations.

Studying the kinetic and kinematics of the rim-tire combination is very important in full vehicle simulations, as well as for the tire design process. Tire maneuvers are either quasi-static, such as steady-state rolling, or dynamic, such as traction and braking. The rolling of the tire over obstacles and potholes and, more generally, over uneven roads are other examples of tire dynamic maneuvers. In the latter case, tire dynamic models are used for durability assessment of the vehicle chassis, and should be studied using high fidelity simulation models. In this study, a three-dimensional finite element model (FEM) has been developed using the commercial software package ABAQUS. The purpose of this study is to investigate the tire dynamic behavior in multiple case studies in which the transient characteristics are highly involved.

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.

To study vehicle dynamics, we need to know the forces and moments acting on the vehicle. The most important forces and moments acting on the vehicle are generated at the tire contact patch. A semi-empirical tire model was developed at Advanced Vehicle Dynamics Lab (AVDL) to use for vehicle simulations for steady-state conditions. In this paper, we extended that model to account for transient conditions. We present the basic concept, the development of the tire model, and selective simulation results. The transient tire model is developed by including the effects of the vertical load variations due to the velocity and the acceleration to the tire characteristic parameters. The simulation was performed for the semi-empirical transient tire model in two scenarios. The vehicle driving and braking maneuver was simulated to present the transient longitudinal tire behavior. The vehicle lane changing maneuver also was performed to present the transient lateral tire behavior.

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.

Driving assistance system is regarded as an effective method to improve driving safety and comfort and is widely used in automobiles. However, due to the different driving styles of different drivers, their acceptance and comfort of driving assistance systems are also different, which greatly affects the driving experience. The key to solving the problem is to let the system understand the driving style and achieve humanization or personalization. This paper focuses on clustering and identification of different driving styles. In this paper, based on the driver's real vehicle experiment, a driving data acquisition platform was built, meanwhile driving conditions were set and drivers were recruited to collect driving information. In order to facilitate the identification of driving style, the correlation analysis of driving features is conducted and the principal component analysis method is used to reduce the dimension of driving features.

One of the principal goals of modern vehicle control systems is to ensure passenger safety during dangerous maneuvers. Their effectiveness relies on providing appropriate parameter inputs. Tire-road contact forces are among the most important because they provide helpful information that could be used to mitigate vehicle instabilities. Unfortunately, measuring these forces requires expensive instrumentation and is not suitable for commercial vehicles. Thus, accurately estimating them is a crucial task. In this work, two estimation approaches are compared, an observer method and a neural network learning technique. Both predict the lateral and longitudinal tire-road contact forces. The observer approach takes into account system nonlinearities and estimates the stochastic states by using an extended Kalman filter technique to perform data fusion based on the popular bicycle model.

To meet the new requirements of braking system for modern electrified and intelligent vehicles, various novel electro-mechanical brake boosters (Eboosters) are emerging. This paper is aimed at a new type of the Ebooster, which is mainly consisted of a permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM), a two-stage reduction transmission and a servo mechanism. Among them, the PMSM is a vital actuator to realize the functions of the Ebooster. To get fast response of the Ebooster system, a novel control strategy employing a maximum torque per ampere (MTPA) control with current compensation decoupling and current-adjusting adaptive flux-weakening control is proposed, which requires the PMSM can operate in a large speed range and maintain a certain anti-load interference capability. Firstly, the wide speed control strategy for the Ebooster’s PMSM is designed in MATLAB/Simulink.

With the development of modern vehicle chassis control systems, such as Anti-Lock Brake System (ABS), Acceleration Slip Regulation (ASR), Electronic Stability Control (ESC), and Regenerative Braking System (RBS) for EVs, etc., there comes a new requirement for the vehicle brake system that is the precise control of the wheel brake pressure. The Electro-Hydraulic Brake system (EHB), which owns an ability to adjust four wheels’ brake pressure independently, can be a good match with these systems. However, the traditional control logic of EHB is based on the PWM (Pulse-Width Modulation), which has a low control accuracy of linear electromagnetic valves. Therefore, this paper presents a research of the linear electro-magnetic valve characteristic analysis, and proposes a precise pressure control algorithm of the EHB system with a feed forward and a PID control of linear electro-magnetic valves.

Tire modeling plays an important role in the development of an Active Vehicle Safety System. As part of a larger project that aims at developing an integrated chassis control system, this study investigates the performance of a 19” all-season tire on ice for a sport utility vehicle. A design of experiment has been formulated to quantify the effect of operational parameters, specifically: wheel slip, normal load, and inflation pressure on the tire tractive performance. The experimental work was conducted on the Terramechanics Rig in the Advanced Vehicle Dynamics Laboratory at Virginia Tech. The paper investigates an approach for the parameterization of the Dugoff tire model based on the experimental data collected. Compared to other models, this model is attractive in terms of its simplicity, low number of parameters, and easy implementation for real-time applications.

Roundabouts are one of the most complex traffic environments in urban roads, and a key challenge for intelligent driving decision-making. Deep reinforcement learning, as an emerging solution for intelligent driving decisions, has the advantage of avoiding complex algorithm design and sustainable iteration. For the decision difficulty in roundabout scenarios, this paper proposes an artificial potential field based Soft Actor-Critic (APF-SAC) algorithm. Firstly, based on the Carla simulator and Gym framework, a reinforcement learning simulation system for roundabout driving is built. Secondly, to reduce reinforcement learning exploration difficulty, global path planning and path smoothing algorithms are designed to generate and optimize the path to guide the agent.