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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.

As a novel assist actuator of brake system, the electromechanical brake (EMB) booster has played a significant role in the battery electric vehicles and automatic driving vehicles. It has advantages of independent to vacuum source, active braking, and tuning pedal feeling compared with conventional vacuum brake booster. In this article, a novel EMB booster system is proposed, which is consisted of a permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM), a two-stage reduction by gears and ball screw, a servo body, and a reaction disk. Together with the hydraulic control unit, it has two working modes: active braking for automatic drive and passive braking for driver intervention. The structure and work principle of the electric brake booster system is first introduced. The precise control from pedal force to hydraulic pressure is the key for such a power-assisted brake actuator. We translate the control problem of force feedback control to position tracking control.

This paper presents a unified novel function-based brake control architecture, which is designed based on a top-down approach with functional abstraction and modularity. The proposed control architecture includes a commands interpreter module, including a driver commands interpreter to interpret driver intention, and a command integration to integrate the driver intention with senor-guided active driving command, state observers for estimation of vehicle sideslip, vehicle speed, tire lateral and longitudinal slips, tire-road friction coefficient, etc., a commands integrated control allocation module which aims to generate braking force and yaw moment commands and provide optimal distribution among four wheels without body instability and wheel lock or slip, a low-level control module includes four wheel pressure control modules, each of which regulates wheel pressure by fast and accurate tracking commanded wheel pressure.

High-precision and real-time ego-motion estimation is vital for autonomous vehicle. There is a lot GPS-denied maneuver such as underground parking lot in urban areas. Therefore, the localization system relying solely on GPS cannot meets the requirements. Recently, lidar odometry and visual odometry have been introduced into localization systems to overcome the problem of missing GPS signals. Compared with visual odometry, lidar odometry is not susceptible to light, which is widely applied in weak-light environments. Besides, the autonomous parking is highly dependent on the geometric information around the vehicle, which makes building map of surroundings essential for autonomous vehicle. We propose a lidar inertial odometry and mapping. By sensor fusion, we compensate for the drawback of applying a single sensor, allowing the system to provide a more accurate estimate.

Traffic accidents avoidance is one of the main advantages for automated vehicles. As one of the main causes of vehicle collision accidents, lane changing of the ego vehicle in case that the obstacle vehicles appear in the blind spot with uncertain motion intentions is one of the main goals for the automated vehicle. An intention-aware lane changing collision assistance strategy basing on traffic situation assessment in the complex traffic scenarios is proposed in this paper. Typical Regions of Interest (ROI) within the detection range of the blind spots are selected basing on the road topology structures and state space consisting of the ego vehicle and the obstacle vehicles. Then the motion intentions of the obstacle vehicles in ROI are identified basing on Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) and the corresponding motion trajectories are predicted basing on the state equation.

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.

Lane detection and tracking play a key role in autonomous driving, not only in the LKA System but help estimate the pose of the vehicle. While there has been significant development in recent years, traditional outdoor SLAM algorithms still struggle to provide reliable information in challenging dynamic environments such as lack of roadside landscape or surrounding vehicles at almost the same speed or on the road in the woods. On the structured road, lane markings as static semantic features may provide a stable landmark assist in robust localization. As most of the current lane detection work mainly on separated images ignoring the relationship between adjacent frames, we propose a pixel-level lane tracking method for autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we introduce a deep network to detect and track lane features. The network has two parallel branches. One branch detects the lane position, while the other extracts the point description on a pixel level.

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.

Minimum energy consumption with maximum comfort driving experience define the ideal human mobility. Recent technological advances in most Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) on electric vehicles not only present a significant opportunity for automated eco-driving but also enhance the safety and comfort level. Understanding driving styles that make the systems more human-like or personalized for ADAS is the key to improve the system comfort. This research focuses on the personalized and green adaptive cruise control for intelligent electric vehicle, which is also known to be MyEco-ACC. MyEco-ACC is based on the optimization of regenerative braking and typical driving styles. Firstly, a driving style model is abstracted as a Hammerstein model and its key parameters vary with different driving styles. Secondly, the regenerative braking system characteristics for the electric vehicle equipped with 4-wheel hub motors are analyzed and braking force distribution strategy is designed.

When automobile is at the threat of collisions, steering usually needs a shorter longitudinal distance than braking to avoid collision, especially at a high speed. In emergency steering evasion, the vehicle may be out of the road or colliding with obstacles ahead when the driver’s steering torque is excessive or insufficient. In view of the above problems, this paper presents an emergency steering evasion torque assistance system based on optimized trajectory. First, a feasible steering evasion area is established which treats the paths of excessive and insufficient steering as boundary conditions in this paper. An optimized trajectory is derived from the lateral acceleration of the vehicle and the time to the adjacent lane as optimization conditions. Second, a two degree of freedom vehicle model is used to represent dynamics of the vehicle.

Sloped medians provide a run-off area for errant vehicles so that they can be safely stopped off-road with or without barriers placed in the sloped median. However, in order to optimize the design of sloped medians and the containment barriers, it is essential to accurately model the behavior of vehicles on such sloped terrain surfaces. In this study, models of a vehicle fleet comprising a small sedan and a pickup truck and sloped terrain surface are developed in CarSim™ to simulate errant vehicle behavior on sloped median. Full-scale crash tests were conducted using the vehicle fleet driven across a 9.754 meters wide median with a 6:1 slope at speeds ranging from 30 to 70 km/h. Measured data such as the lateral accelerations of the vehicle as well as chassis rotations (roll and pitch) were synchronized with the vehicle motion obtained from the video data.

Brake-by-wire (BBW) system has drawn a great attention in recent years as driven by rapidly increasing demands on both active brake controls for intelligent vehicles and regenerative braking controls for electric vehicles. However, unlike conversional brake systems, the reliability of the brake-by-wire systems remains to be challenging due to its lack of physical connection in case of system failure. There are various causes for the failure of a BBW system, such as failure of brake controller, loss of sensor signals, failure of communication or even power supply, to name a few. This paper presents a fault-tolerant control under novel control architecture. The proposed control architecture includes a driver command interpreter module, a command integration module, a control allocation module, a fault diagnosis module and state observers. The fault-tolerant control is designed based on a quadratic optimal control method with consideration of actuator constraints.

Effectively detecting road boundaries in real time is critical to the applications of autonomous vehicles, such as vehicle localization, path planning and environmental understanding. To precisely extract the road boundaries from the 3D-LiDAR data, a dedicated algorithm consisting of four steps is proposed in this paper. The steps are as follows: Firstly, the 3D-LiDAR data is pre-processed by employing the RANSAC method, the ground points are quickly separated from the original 3D-LiDAR point cloud to reduce the disturbance from the obstacles on the road, this greatly decreases the size of the point cloud to be processed. Secondly, based on the principle of 3D-LiDAR scanning, the ground points are divided into scan layers. And the road boundary points of each scan layer are detected by using three spatial features based on sliding window.

In the field of automatic driving, the combination of 3D LIDAR and inertial measurement unit (IMU) is a common sensor configuration scheme in laser point-cloud localization, high-precision map making and point-cloud target detection. So it is critical to calibrate LIDAR and IMU accurately. At present, due to the large volume and high cost of 3D LIDAR with high-line-number(Such as 64 lines or 128 lines), the configuration scheme of using multiple low-line-number 3D LIDARs appears in the automatic driving vehicle sensing system. However, the common calibration methods are not suitable for multi 3D LIDARs and IMU parameters calibration on autonomous vehicle, which have the disadvantages of cumbersome implementation and low accuracy. In this paper, a joint calibration test platform composed of dual LIDARs and IMU is assembled, and a method of precise automatic calibration based on GPS/RTK data is proposed.

The electric vehicles and the intelligent vehicles put forward to new requirements for the brake system, such as the vacuum-independent braking, automatic or active braking, and regenerative braking, which are the key link for the vehicle’s safety and economy. However, the traditional vacuum brake booster is no longer able to meet these requirements. In this article, a novel integrated power-assisted actuator of brake system is proposed to satisfy the brake system requirements of the electric vehicles and intelligent vehicles. The electronic brake booster system is designed to achieve the function of boosting pedal force of driver, being independent on vacuum source, supplying autonomous or active braking. It is mainly composed of a permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM), a two-stage reduction transmission (gears and a ball screw), a servo body, and a reaction disk. The scheme design and power-assisted braking control are the key for the electronic actuator.

This paper presents a power assisted braking control based on a novel mechatronic booster system. A brake pedal feel control unit is first discussed which includes a pedal emulator with an angular sensor to detect driver’s pedal travel, a signal processing module with a Kalman filter for sensor signal conditioning, and a driver braking intention detection and behavior recognition module based on the displacement and velocity of the pedal travel. A power assisted braking control is then presented as the core of the system which consists of controls on basic power assist, velocity compensation and friction compensation. The friction is estimated based on a generic algorithm offline. A motor controller is designed to provide the desired torque for the power assist. Finally, a novel mechatronic booster system is designed and built with an experimental platform set up with a widely adopted rapid prototype system using dSPACE products, such as MicroAutoBox, RapidPro, etc.

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.