Search Results

Environmental perception is a crucial subsystem in autonomous vehicles. In order to build safe and efficient traffic transportation, several researches have been proposed to build accurate, robust and real-time perception systems. Camera and LiDAR are widely equipped on autonomous self-driving cars and developed with many algorithms in recent years. The fusion system of camera and LiDAR provides state-of the-art methods for environmental perception due to the defects of single vehicular sensor. Extrinsic parameter calibration is able to align the coordinate systems of sensors and has been drawing enormous attention. However, differ from spatial alignment of two sensors’ data, joint calibration of multi-sensors (more than two sensors) should balance the degree of alignment between each two sensors.

Tracking vehicle trajectories is essential for autonomous vehicles and advanced driver-assistance systems to understand traffic environment and evaluate collision risk. In order to reduce the position deviation and fluctuation of tracking on-road vehicle by millimeter-wave radar (MMWR), an interactive multi-model Kalman filter (IMM-KF) tracking algorithm including data association and track management is proposed. In general, it is difficult to model the target vehicle accurately due to lack of vehicle kinematics parameters, like wheel base, uncertainty of driving behavior and limitation of sensor’s field of view. To handle the uncertainty problem, an interacting multiple model (IMM) approach using Kalman filters is employed to estimate multitarget’s states. Then the compensation of radar ego motion is achieved, since the original measurement is under the radar polar coordinate system.

Multi-sensor information fusion framework is the eyes for unmanned driving and Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) to perceive the surrounding environment. In addition to the perception of the surrounding environment, real-time vehicle localization is also the key and difficult point of unmanned driving technology. The disappearance of high-precision GPS signal suddenly and defect of the lane line will bring much more difficult and dangerous for vehicle localization when the vehicle is on unmanned driving. In this paper, a road boundary feature extraction algorithm is proposed based on multi-sensor information fusion of automotive radar and vision to realize the auxiliary localization of vehicles. Firstly, we designed a 79GHz (78-81GHz) Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) millimeter-wave radar, which can obtain the point cloud information of road boundary features such as guardrail or green belt and so on.

The radar-based advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) like autonomous emergency braking (AEB) and forward collision warning (FCW) can reduce accidents, so as to make vehicles, drivers and pedestrians safer. For active safety, automotive millimeter-wave radar is an indispensable role in the automotive environmental sensing system since it can work effectively regardless of the bad weather while the camera fails. One crucial task of the automotive radar is to detect and distinguish some objects close to each other precisely with the increasingly complex of the road condition. Nowadays almost all the automotive radar products work in bidimensional area where just the range and azimuth can be measured. However, sometimes in their field of view it is not easy for them to differentiate some objects, like the car, the manhole covers and the guide board, when they align with each other in vertical direction.

Electric Power Steering (EPS) is the actuator of several lateral-dynamic-related Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). A driving simulator with EPS will be much helpful for the ADAS development. However, if a real EPS is used in the driving simulator, it is quite difficult to realize the road reaction force accurately and responsively. To overcome this weakness, a virtual EPS platform is established. The virtual EPS platform contains two parts: one is the vehicle and EPS model, the other is the force feedback actuator (FFA) of the Steer-by-Wire (SBW) system. The FFA is an interface between the driver and the EPS/vehicle model. The reactive torque of the FFA is obtained based on the models. Meanwhile, the input of the EPS model is the steering angle of the FFA. Comparing to a real EPS, the virtual EPS platform has a problem of instability because of the actuator lag of the FFA. Therefore, a damping control method is applied to make the system stable.

Path tracking is the rudimentary capability and primary task for autonomous ground vehicles (AGVs). In this paper, a novel four-wheel-independent-steering (4WIS) and four-wheel-independent-drive (4WID) electric vehicle (EV) is proposed which is equipped with steer-by-wire (SBW) system. For path-tracking controller design, the nonlinear vehicle model with 2 degrees of freedom (DOF) is built utilizing the nonlinear Dugoff tire model. The nonlinear dynamic model of SBW system is conducted as well considering the external disturbances. As to the path-tracking controller design, an integrated four-wheel steering (4WS) and direct yaw-moment control (DYC) system is designed based on the model predictive control (MPC) algorithm to track the target path described by desired yaw angle and lateral displacement. Then, the fast terminal sliding mode controller (FTSMC) is proposed for the SBW system to suppress disturbances.

In the recent years, the interaction between human driver and Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) has gradually aroused people’s concern. As a result, the concept of personalized ADAS is being put forward. As an important system of ADAS, Lane Keeping Assistance System (LKAS) also attracts great attention. To achieve personalized LKAS, driver lane keeping characteristic (DLKC) indices which could distinguish different driver lane keeping behavior should be researched. However, there are few researches on DLKC indices for personalized LKAS. Although there are many researches on modeling driver steering behavior, these researches are not sufficient to obtain DLKC indices. One reason is that most of researches are for double lane change behavior which is different from driver lane keeping behavior. The other reason is that the researches on driver lane keeping behavior only provide model structure and rarely discuss identification procedure such as how to select suitable data.

In China there are many mixed driving roads which cause a lot of safety problems between vehicles and pedalcyclists. Research on driver behavior under risk scenarios with pedalcyclist is relatively few. In this paper driver brake parameters under naturalistic driving are studied and pedalcyclists include bicyclist, tricyclist, electric bicyclist and motorcyclist. Brake reaction time and maximum brake jerk are used to evaluate driver brake reaction speed. Average deceleration is used to evaluate the effect of driver brake operation. Maximum deceleration is used to evaluate driver braking ability. Driver behaviors collected in China are classified and risk scenarios with pedalcyclist are obtained. Driver brake parameters are extracted and statistical characteristics of driver brake parameters are obtained. Influence factors are analyzed with univariate ANOVA and regression analysis.

In order to improve the robustness and stability of autonomous vehicle at high speed, a path tracking approach which combines front steering and differential braking is investigated in this paper. A bicycle model with 3-DOFs is established and a linear time-varying predictive model using front steering as its control input can be derived. Based on model predictive theory, the path tracking issue using linear time-varying model predictive control can be transformed into an online quadratic programming problem with constraints. The expected front steering angle can be obtained from online moving optimization. Then the direct yawing control is adopted to treat two types of differential braking control. The first one investigates steady-state gain of yaw rate in linear 2-DOFs vehicle model, and designs a stable differential braking controller which is based on reference yaw rate.

Faced with intricate traffic conditions, the single sensor has been unable to meet the safety requirements of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving. In the field of multi-target tracking, the number of targets detected by vision sensor is sometimes less than the current tracks while the number of targets detected by millimeter wave radar is more than the current tracks. Hence, a multi-sensor information fusion algorithm is presented by utilizing advantage of both vision sensor and millimeter wave radar. The multi-sensor fusion algorithm is based on centralized fusion strategy that the fusion center takes a unified track management. At First, vision sensor and radar are used to detect the target and to measure the range and the azimuth angle of the target. Then, the detections data from vision sensor and radar is transferred to fusion center to join the multi-target tracking with the prediction of current tracks.

The coordinated control of stability and steering systems in collision avoidance steering evasion has been widely studied in vehicle active safety area, but the studies are mainly aimed at autonomous vehicle without driver or conventional combustion engine vehicle. This paper focuses on the control of hybrid vehicle integrated with rear hub in emergency steering evasion situation, and considering the driver’s characteristics. First, the mathematics model of vehicle dynamics and driver has been given. Second, based on the planned steering evasion path, the model predictive control method is presented for achieving higher evasion path tracking accuracy under driver’s steering input. The prediction model includes an adaptive preview distance driver model and a vehicle dynamics model to predict the driver input and the vehicle trajectory.

With the development of autonomous driving, the penetration rate of autonomous vehicles on the road will continue to grow. As a result, the social cooperation ability of autonomous vehicles will have a great effect on the social acceptance of autonomous driving, which can be described as harmony with traffic. In order to research the evaluation method of the harmony with traffic, this paper proposes a subjective and objective mapping evaluation method based on the Mean Impact Value and Backpropagation (MIV-BP) Neural Network, with the merging vehicle on the expressway ramp as the research object. Firstly, by taking 16 original objective indexes obtained by theoretical analysis and the subjective evaluation results as input and output, respectively, the BP Neural Network model is constructed as a baseline model. Secondly, nine selected objective indexes are selected by the MIV method based on the baseline model.

Lane marking detection plays a crucial role in Autonomous Driving Systems or Advanced Driving Assistance System. Vision based lane marking detection technology has been well discussed and put into practical application. LiDAR is more stable for challenging environment compared to cameras, and with the development of LiDAR technology, price and lifetime are no longer an issue. We propose a lane marking detection algorithm based on solid-state LiDARs. First a series of data pre-processing operations were done for the solid-state LiDARs with small field of view, and the needed ground points are extracted by the RANSAC method. Then, based on the OTSU method, we propose an approach for extracting lane marking points using intensity information.

As one of the key technologies in autonomous driving, the lateral planning module guides the lateral movement during the driving process. An integrated lateral planning module should consider the non-holonomic constraints of a vehicle, the optimization of the generated trajectory and the applicability to various scenarios. However, the current lateral planning methods can only meet parts of these requirements. In order to satisfy all the performance requirements above, a novel Potential Field (PF) based lateral planning method is proposed in this paper. Firstly, a PF model is built to describe the potential risk of the traffic entities, including the obstacles, road boundaries and lines. The potential fields of these traffic entities are determined by their properties and the traffic regulations. Secondly, the planning algorithm is presented, which comprises three modules: state prediction, state search and trajectory generation.

An integrated automatic driving system consists of perception, planning and control. As one of the key components of an autonomous driving system, the longitudinal planning module guides the vehicle to accelerate or decelerate automatically on the roads. A complete longitudinal planning module is supposed to consider the flexibility to various scenarios and multi-objective optimization including safety, comfort and efficiency. However, most of the current longitudinal planning methods can not meet all the requirements above. In order to satisfy the demands mentioned above, a new Potential Field (PF) based longitudinal planning method is presented in this paper. Firstly, a PF model is constructed to depict the potential risk of surrounding traffic entities, including obstacles and roads. The shape of each potential field is closely related to the property of the corresponding traffic entity.

Cut-in scenario is common in traffic and has potential collision risk. Human driver can detect other vehicle’s cut-in intention and take appropriate maneuvers to reduce collision risk. However, autonomous driving systems don’t have as good performance as human driver. Hence a deeper understanding on driving behavior is necessary. How to make decisions like human driver is an important problem for automated vehicles. In this paper, a method is proposed to classify the dangerous cut-in situations and normal ones. Dangerous cases were extracted automatically from naturalistic driving database using specific detection criteria. Among those cases, 70 valid dangerous cut-in cases were selected manually. The largest deceleration of subject vehicle is over 4 m/s2. Besides, 249 normal cut-in cases were extracted by going through video data of 2000km traveled distance. In normal driving cases, subject vehicle may brake or keep accelerating and the largest deceleration was less than 3 m/s2.

Aiming at the test safety problems in the early stage of self-driving cars development, firstly the virtual vehicle on-board CAN data acquisition module of the present project was designed based on virtual LabVIEW. Then a wireless remote control system for the self-driving car was constructed, which integrated the built virtual vehicle on-board CAN data acquisition system, the remote real-time image monitoring module and the remote upper computer control module based on ZigBee wireless transmission. It can execute the environmental awareness training and continuous and complex motion manipulation testing of the vehicle without relying on the driver, which can solve the safety problems in the tests of initial development of self-driving cars. Finally, the four-wheel independent steering electric vehicle was used as the self-driving test vehicle, and the wireless remote control system was tested on the double lane change type path and S-type path.

For high levels autonomous driving functions, the Decision Layer often takes on more responsibility due to the requirement of facing more diverse and even rare conditions. It is very difficult to accurately find a safe and efficient lane change timing when autonomous vehicles encounter complex traffic flow and need to change lanes. The traditional method based on rules and experiences has the limitation that it is difficult to be taken into account all possible conditions. Therefore, this paper designs a lane-changing decision algorithm based on data-driven and machine learning, and uses the DQN (Deep Q Network) algorithm in Reinforcement Learning to determine the appropriate lane-changing timing and target lane. Firstly, the scene characteristics of the highway are analyzed, the input and output of the decision-making model are designated and the data from the Perception Layer are processed.

The past decade has witnessed the rapid development of autonomous parking technology, since it has promising capacity to improve traffic efficiency and reduce the burden on drivers. However, it is prone to the trap of self-centeredness when each vehicle is automated parking in isolation. And it is easy to cause traffic congestion and even chaos when multiple autonomous vehicles require of parking into the same lot. In order to address the multiple vehicle parking problem, we propose a parking planning method with genetic algorithm. Firstly, an optimal mathematic model is established to describe the multiple autonomous vehicle parking problem. Secondly, a genetic algorithm is designed to solve the optimization problem. Thirdly, illustrative examples are developed to verify the parking planner. The performance of the present method indicates its competence in addressing parking multiple autonomous vehicles problem.

Although autonomous valet parking technology can replace the driver to complete the parking operation, it is easy to cause traffic chaos in the case of lacking scheduling for multiple parking agents, especially when multiple cars compete for the same parking slot at the same time. Therefore, in order to ensure orderly traffic and parking safety, it is necessary to allocate parking slots reasonably for multiple autonomous valet parking vehicles. The parking slots allocation model is built as an optimal problem with constraints. Both parking mileage cost and parking difficult cost are considering at the objective function in the optimization problem. There are three types of constraints. The first is the capacity limit of a single parking slot, the second is the space limit occupied by a single vehicle, and the third is the total capacity limit of the parking lot. After establishing parking slots allocation model, the immune algorithm is coded to solve the problem.