Search Results

It is very significant for autonomous vehicles to have the ability to operate beyond the stable handling limits, which plays a vital role in vehicles’ active safety and enhances riding and driving pleasure. For traditional vehicles, it is rather difficult to control the longitudinal speed, sideslip angle and yaw rate simultaneously when drifting along a given trajectory because they are under-actuated. Nevertheless, for a 4-wheel-independent-drive (4WID) vehicle, it is possible and controllable thanks to its over-actuated characteristics. This article designs a trajectory following control strategy for automated drifting of 4WID vehicles. First, a double-track 7 degree of freedom (7DOF) vehicle dynamic model is established, which incorporates longitudinal and lateral load transfer and considers nonlinear tire models. The controller which proposes a hierarchical architecture is then designed.

This paper proposes a dynamic obstacle avoidance system to help autonomous vehicles drive on high-speed structured roads. The system is mainly composed of trajectory planning and tracking controllers. The potential field (PF) model is introduced to establish a three-dimensional potential field for structured roads and obstacle vehicles. The trajectory planning problem that considers the vehicle’s and tires’ dynamics constraints is transformed into an optimization problem with muti-constraints by combining the model predictive control (MPC) algorithms. The trajectory tracking controller used in this paper is based on the 7 degrees of freedom (DOF) vehicle model and the UniTire tire model, which was discussed in detail in previous work [25, 26]. The controller maintains good trajectory tracking performance even under extreme driving conditions, such as roads with poor adhesion conditions, where the car’s tires enter the nonlinear region easily.

Lane-changing is a typical traffic scene effecting on road traffic with high request for reliability, robustness and driving comfort to improve the road safety and transportation efficiency. The development of connected autonomous vehicles with V2V communication provide more advanced control strategies to research of lane-changing. Meanwhile, four-wheel steering is an effective way to improve flexibility of vehicle. The front and rear wheels rotate in opposite direction to reduce the turning radius to improve the servo agility operation at the low speed while those rotate in same direction to reduce the probability of the slip accident to improve the stability at the high speed. Hence, this paper established Four-Wheel-Steering(4WS) vehicle dynamic model and quasi real lane-changing scenes to analyze the motion constraints of the vehicles.

The effects of different biodiesel blends on engine-out emissions under various transient conditions were investigated in this study using fast response diagnostic equipment. The experimental work was conducted on a modern 3.0 L, V6 high pressure common rail diesel engine fuelled with mineral diesel (B0) and three different blends of rapeseed methyl esters (RME) (B30, B60, B100 by volume) without any modifications of engine parameters. DMS500, Fast FID and Fast CLD were used to measure particulate matter (PM), total hydrocarbon (THC) and nitrogen monoxide (NO) respectively. The tests were conducted during a 12 seconds period with two tests in which load and speed were changed simultaneously and one test with only load changing. The results show that as biodiesel blend ratio increased, total particle number (PN) and THC were decreased whereas NO was increased for all the three transient conditions.

The mechanical properties of sandy road are quite different from those of hard surface road. For vehicle control systems such as EMS (engine management system), TCU (transmission control unit) and ABS (antilock brake system), the strategies and parameters set for solid surface road are not optimal for driving on sandy road. It is an effective way to improve the mobility of all-terrain vehicles by identifying sandy road online and shifting the control strategies and parameters of control systems to sandy sets. In this paper, a sandy road identification algorithm for SUVs is proposed. Firstly, the vehicle signals, such as engine torque and speed, gear position, wheel and vehicle speed, are acquired from EMS, TCU and ESP (electronic stability program) through CAN (controller area network) bus respectively. Based on the information and longitudinal force equilibrium equation, the travelling resistance of vehicle is estimated.

In the intelligent airbag system, the detection accuracy of occupant position is the precondition and plays a vital role to control airbag detonation time and inflated strength during the crash. Through accurately analyzing the seat surface pressure distributions of different occupant sitting position and types, an occupant position recognition approach which purely uses occupant pressure distribution information measured by seat pressure sensors is presented with the method of Support Vector Machine. In the end, the distribution samples with different occupant sitting position and types are used to train and test the recognition approach, and the good validity and accuracy are shown in the experiments.

Vehicle yaw stability control (YSC) can actively adjust the working state of the chassis actuator to generate a certain additional yaw moment for the vehicle, which effectively helps the vehicle maintain good driving quality under strong transient conditions such as high-speed turning and continuous lane change. However, the traditional YSC pursues too much driving stability after activation, ignoring the difference of multi-objective requirements of yaw maneuverability, actuator energy consumption and other requirements in different vehicle stability states, resulting in the decline of vehicle driving quality. Therefore, a vehicle yaw stability model predictive control strategy for dynamic and multi-objective requirements is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the unstable characteristics of vehicle motion are analyzed, and the nonlinear two-degree-of-freedom vehicle dynamics models are established respectively.

High speed on-off valves (HSVs) are widely used in advanced hydraulic braking actuators, including regenerative braking systems and active safety systems, which take crucial part in improving the energy efficiency and safety performance of vehicles. As a component involving multiple physical fields, the HSV is affected by the interaction of the fields-fluid, electromagnetic, and mechanical. Since the opening of the HSV is small and the flow speed is high, cavitation and vortex are inevitably brought out so that increase the valve’s noise and instability. However, it is costly and complex to observe the flow status by visual fluid experiments. Hence, in this article a visual multi-physics system simulation model of the HSV is explored, in which the flow field model of the HSV built by computational fluid dynamic (CFD) is co-simulated with the model of hydraulic actuator established by AMESim.

Combustion visualizations were carried out in a constant volume vessel to study the partially premixed combustion of a gasoline-like fuel using high speed imaging. The test fuel (G80H20) is composed by volume 80% commercial gasoline and 20% n-heptane. The effects of ambient gas composition, ambient temperature and injection pressure on G80H20 combustion characteristics were analyzed. Meanwhile, a comparison of the EGR effect on combustion process between G80H20 and diesel was made. Four ambient gas conditions that represent the in-cylinder gas compositions of a heavy-duty diesel engine with EGR ratios of 0%, 20%, 40% and 60% were used to simulate EGR conditions. Variables also include two ambient temperature (910K and 870K) and two injection pressure (20 MPa and 50 MPa) conditions.

This paper sets up a simplified dynamic model for simulating the yaw/roll stability of heavy tractor-semitrailer using Matlab/Simulink. A linear quadratic regulator (LQR) based on partial-state feedback controller is used to optimize the roll stability of the vehicle. The control objective for optimizing roll stability is to be reducing the lateral load transfer rate while keeping the suspension angle less than the maximum allowable angle. The simulation result shows that the LQR controller is effective in the active roll stability control of the heavy tractor-semitrailer.