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Intelligent driving, aimed for collision avoidance and self-navigation, is mainly based on environmental sensing via radar, lidar and/or camera. While each of the sensors has its own unique pros and cons, camera is especially good at object detection, recognition and tracking. However, unpredictable environmental illumination can potentially cause misdetection or false detection. To investigate the influence of illumination conditions on detection algorithms, we reproduced various illumination intensities in a photo-realistic virtual world, which leverages recent progress in computer graphics, and verified vehicle detection effect there. In the virtual world, the environmental illumination is controlled precisely from low to high to simulate different illumination conditions in the driving scenarios (with relative luminous intensity from 0.01 to 400). Sedan cars with different colors are modelled in the virtual world and used for detection task.

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).

Driver individualities is crucial for the development of the Advanced Driver Assistant System (ADAS). Due to the mechanism that specific driving operation action of individual driver under typical conditions is convergent and differentiated, a novel driver individualities recognition method is constructed in this paper using random forest model. A driver behavior data acquisition system was built using dSPACE real-time simulation platform. Based on that, the driving data of the tested drivers were collected in real time. Then, we extracted main driving data by principal component analysis method. The fuzzy clustering analysis was carried out on the main driving data, and the fuzzy matrix was constructed according to the intrinsic attribute of the driving data. The drivers’ driving data were divided into multiple clusters.

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.

This paper proposes a Real-Time Estimation of Radar Cross Section for ADAS Simulation, aimed to enable math-based virtual development and test of ADAS. The electromagnetic scattering mechanism is firstly analyzed with targets to be typical objects in traffic. Then a geometric model is developed, in which the object surfaces are divided into multiple scattering zones corresponding to different scattering mechanism. According to different surface curvature radius and scattering mechanism, the scattering zones are approximately equivalent to plane, cylinder, sphere and so on. Using the ARD model based on an improved physical optics and diffraction theory, RCS value of a zone is estimated. Then the RCS of the object surface is obtained by vector superposition of all zones. Some typical simulation comparisons are carried out, which proves the practicability of our method.

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.

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.

The conventional radar modeling methods for automotive applications were either function-based or physics-based. The former approach was mainly abstracted as a solution of the intersection between geometric representations of radar beam and targets, while the latter one took radar detection mechanism into consideration by means of “ray tracing”. Although they each has its unique advantages, they were often unrealistic or time-consuming to meet actual simulation requirements. This paper presents a combined geometric and physical modeling method on millimeter-wave radar systems for Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) modulation format under a 3D simulation environment. With the geometric approach, a link between the virtual radar and 3D environment is established. With the physical approach, on the other hand, the ideal target detection and measurement are contaminated with noise and clutters aimed to produce the signals as close to the real ones as possible.

Aimed to provide an effective solution for control-oriented applications, this paper proposes a novel method using a high-precision digital map to achieve high-accuracy positioning with fast updating rate. First, the map is developed using a high-definition LiDAR (Velodyne HDL 64E) and a RTK-GNSS system, which contains lane-level waypoints, road width, curb and typical obstacles along the road. Next, a robust version of ICP (Iterative Closest Point) is proposed to clean the corresponding points of large errors on map matching (MM). Finally, based on the large set of data from the environmental map, an unscented Kalman filter (UKF) is applied to fuse GNSS signal and dead reckoning (DR) to estimate the position. Thus the searching scope on the map can be considerably reduced so that the matching speed can be greatly improved. The high-precision digital map can be used not only for global path planning, but also for local driving detection and path planning.

LiDAR sensors have played more and more important role on Intelligent and Connected Vehicles (ICV) and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) .However, the development and testing of LiDAR sensors under real driving environment for ADAS applications are greatly limited by various factors, and often are impossible due to safety concerns. This paper proposed a novel functional LiDAR model under virtual driving environment to support development of LiDAR-based ADAS applications under early stage. Unlike traditional approaches on LiDAR sensor modeling, the proposed method includes both geometrical modeling approach and physical modeling approach. While geometric model mainly produces ideal scanning results based on computer graphics, the physical model further brings physical influences on top of the geometric model. The range detection is derived and optimized based on its physical detection and measurement mechanism.

Environmental sensing and perception is one of the key technologies on intelligent driving or autonomous vehicles. As a complementary part to current radar and lidar sensors, ultrasonic sensor has become more and more popular due to its high value to the cost. Different from other sensors mainly based on propagation of electromagnetic wave, ultrasonic sensor possesses some unique features and physical characteristics that bring many merits to autonomous vehicle research, like transparent obstacles and highly reflective surfaces detection. Its low-cost property can further bring down hardware cost to foster widespread use of intelligent driving or autonomous vehicles. To accelerate the development of autonomous vehicle, this paper proposes a high fidelity ultrasonic sensor model based on its physical characteristics, including obstacle detection, distance measurement and signal attenuation.

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.

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.

Nowadays, the vehicle market puts forward urgent requirement for new kinds of braking booster because the traditional vacuum booster cannot meet the demands of new energy vehicles anymore. However, one problem that all the new plans should face is how to guarantee an ideal pedal feeling. In this paper, a novel mechatronics braking booster is proposed, and servo motor introduced into the booster makes the assist rate can be adjusted under a great degrees of freedom, so the structural parameters and control parameters of the booster should be determined elaborately to get an optimal pedal feeling. The pedal feeling is always represented by the pedal stoke-force curve which is influenced by different parameters.

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.

This paper reports an effort to improve plan of vehicle trajectory using an approach with rapidly-exploring random trees (RRT), which has been widely adopted in the prior art for complex and dynamic traffic environment. Design and implement of an integrated threat assessment is presented that evaluates threats of the trajectory. A node and trajectory evaluation index was introduced into the proposed RRT algorithm to connect an appropriate node and select the best trajectory. The contribution of this paper is on the threat assessment that takes into account not only obstacle avoidance but also stability. The simulation is conducted and the results show that the proposed method works as expected and is valid and effective.

In this paper, a model predictive control (MPC) based trajectory tracking scheme utilizing steering wheel and braking or acceleration pedal is proposed for intelligent vehicles. The control objective is to track a desired trajectory which is obtained from the trajectory planner. The proposed control is based on a simplified third-order vehicle model, which consists of longitudinal vehicle dynamics along with a commonly used bicycle model. A nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) is adopted in order to follow a given path by controlling front steering, braking and traction, while fulfilling various physical and design constraints. In order to reduce the computational burden, the NMPC is converted to a linear time-varying (LTV) MPC based on successive online linearization of the nonlinear system model. Two different test conditions have been used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approaches through simulations using Matlab and CarSim.

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.

Power management of a hybrid energy storage system (HESS) with battery and supercapacitor(SC) is of critical importance for electric vehicles to achieve good driving performance, long traveling range and high energy efficiency. Due to the great differences in dynamic characteristics between battery and supercapacitor, and the complexity of a HESS, proper power management strategy between battery and supercapacitor remains to be challenging. The proposed research in this paper is to develop a power-balance and wavelet-transform based strategy for power distribution in a way such that each device can be utilized optimally. The transient dynamics is first decoupled via wavelet-transform algorithm while the power-balance algorithm is employed to improve system robustness based on the desired velocity-SOC relationship and a fuzzy logical controller. Finally some simulations have been conducted with results shown that the proposed strategy is valid and effective.

This paper proposes a novel allocation-based control method for four-wheel independently actuated electric vehicles. In the proposed method, both actuator dynamics and input/output constraints are fully taken into consideration in the control design. First, the actuators are modeled as first-order dynamic systems with delay. Then, the control allocation is formulated as an optimization problem, with the primary objective of minimizing errors between the actual and desired control outputs. Other objectives include minimizing the power consumption and the slew rate of the actuator outputs. As a result, this leads to frequency-dependent allocation that reflects the bandwidth of each actuator. To solve the optimization problem, an efficient numerical algorithm is employed. Finally the proposed control allocation method is implemented to control a four-wheel independently actuated electric vehicle.