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Performance testing and evaluation always plays an important role in the developmental process of a vehicle, which also applies to autonomous vehicles. The complex nature of an autonomous vehicle from architecture to functionality demands even more quality-and-quantity controlled testing and evaluation than ever before. Most of the existing testing methodologies are task-or-scenario based and can only support single or partial functional testing. These approaches may be helpful at the initial stage of autonomous vehicle development. However, as the integrated autonomous system gets mature, these approaches fall short of supporting comprehensive performance evaluation. This paper proposes a novel hierarchical and systematic testing and evaluation approach to bridge the above-mentioned gap.

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.

The slip ratio of vehicle driving wheels is easily beyond a reasonable range in the complex and changeable driving conditions. In order to achieve the adaptive acceleration slip regulation of four-wheel driving (4WD) vehicle, a fuzzy control strategy of Automatic Drive Train Management (ADM) system based on road situation identification was proposed in this paper. Firstly, the influence on the control strategy of ADM system was analyzed from two aspects, which included the different road adhesion coefficients and the vehicle’s ramp driving state. In the meantime several quantitative expressions of relevant control parameters were derived. Secondly, the fuzzy logic control algorithm was adopted to design a road situation identification subsystem and a ramp driving state identification subsystem respectively. The former was based on the μ-S curve model, and the latter was based on the vehicle driving equilibrium 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.

Although advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) have been widely introduced in automotive industry to enhance driving safety and comfort, and to reduce drivers’ driving burden, they do not in general reflect different drivers’ driving styles or customized with individual personalities. This can be important to comfort and enjoyable driving experience, and to improved market acceptance. However, it is challenging to understand and further identify drivers’ driving styles due to large number and great variations of driving population. Previous research has mainly adopted physical approaches in modeling drivers’ driving behavior, which however are often very much limited, if not impossible, in capturing human drivers’ driving characteristics. This paper proposes a reinforcement learning based approach, in which the driving styles are formulated through drivers’ learning processes from interaction with surrounding environment.

Since steering wheel torque feedback is one of the crucial factors for drivers to gain road feel and ensure driving safety, it is especially important to simulate the steering torque feedback for a driving simulator. At present, steering wheel feedback torque is mainly simulated by an electric motor with gear transmission. The torque response is typically slow, which can result in drivers’ discomfort and poor driving maneuverability. This paper presents a novel torque feedback device with magnetorheological (MR) fluid and coil spring. A phase separation control method is also proposed to control its feedback torque, including spring and damping torques respectively. The spring torque is generated by coil spring, the angle of coil spring can be adjusted by controlling a brushless DC motor. The damping torque is generated by MR fluid, the damping coefficient of MR fluid can be adjusted by controlling the current of excitation coil.

Due to growing interest in automated driving, the need for better understanding of human driving behavior in uncertain environment, such as driving behavior at un-signalized crossroad and roundabout, has further increased. Driving behavior at roundabout is greatly influenced by different dynamic factors such as speed, distance and circulating flow of the potentially conflicting vehicles, and drivers should choose whether to leave or wait at the upcoming exit according to these factors. In this paper, the influential dynamic factors and driving behavior characteristics at the roundabout is analyzed in detail, random forest method is then deployed to predict the driving behavior. For training the driving behavior model, four typical roundabout layouts were created under a real-time driving simulator with PanoSim-RT and dSPACE. Traffic participants with different motion style were also set in the simulation platform to mimic real driving conditions.

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).

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.

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.

Steering torque feedback, or steering feel, is widely regarded as an important aspect of driver interface to road feel. To generate a steering feel with the appropriate level of fidelity required by a driver-vehicle system or a driving simulator, it is essential to gain a good understanding of various important influencing factors of steering torque feedback. This paper presents a comprehensive study and analysis of internal and external factors that strongly affect steering torque feedback. A steering torque feedback model with sufficient fidelity is established and verified as the base for this study. The individual- and collective-level influences of these factors on steering torque feedback are analyzed in both time domain and frequency domain, with guidelines provided on how to properly use these influencing factors to control their negative effects in modeling steering torque feedback.

Vision-based Advanced Driver Assistance Systems has achieved rapid growth in recent years. Since vehicle field testing under various driving scenarios can be costly, tedious, unrepeatable, and often dangerous, simulation has thus become an effective means that reduces or partially replaces the conventional field testing in the early development stage. However, most of the commercial tools are lack of elaborate lens/sensor models for the vehicle mounted cameras. This paper presents the system-based camera modeling method integrated virtual environment for vision-based ADAS design, development and testing. We present how to simulate two types of cameras with virtual 3D models and graphic render: Pinhole camera and Fisheye camera. We also give out an application named Envelope based on pinhole camera model which refers to the coverage of Field-of-Views (FOVs) of one or more cameras projected to a specific plane.

Vision-based Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (Vi-ADAS) has achieved rapid growth in recent years. Since vehicle field testing under various driving scenarios can be costly, tedious, unrepeatable, and often dangerous, simulation has thus become an effective means that reduces or partially replaces the conventional field testing in the early development stage. This paper proposes a quantitative assessment framework for model quality evaluation of 3D scene under simulation platform. An imaging model is first built. The problem of solving the imaging model is then transformed into the problem of intrinsic image decomposition. Based on Retinex theory and Non-local texture analyses, a superior intrinsic image decomposition method is adopted to evaluate the fidelity of the 3D scene model through the degree of deviation to the Reflectance and Shading intrinsic maps respectively.