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This paper proposes an intelligent car testing and evaluation method based on digital twins, which is crucial for ensuring the proper functioning of autonomous driving systems. This method utilizes digital twin testing technology to effectively map and integrate real vehicles in real-world testing scenarios with virtual test environments. By enriching the testing and validation environment for smart cars, this approach improves testing efficiency and reduces costs. This study connects real test vehicles with simulation software testing toolchains to build a digital twin autonomous driving testing platform. This platform facilitates the validation, testing, and evaluation of functional algorithms, and case study is conducted through testing and validation of an emergency collision avoidance system. By rapidly applying digital twin testing and evaluation techniques for intelligent cars, this approach accelerates the development and deployment of autonomous vehicles.

According to the statistics of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, driver’s cognitive distraction, which is usually caused by drivers using mobile phones, has become one of the main causes of traffic accidents. To solve this problem and guarantee the safety of man-vehicle-road system, the most critical work is to improve the accuracy of driver’s cognitive state detection. In this paper, a novel driver’s cognitive state detecting method based on LightGBM (Light Gradient Boosting Machine) is proposed. Firstly, cognitive distraction experiments of making calls are carried out on a driving simulator to collect vehicle states, eye tracking and EEG (electron encephalogram) data simultaneously and feature extraction is conducted. Then a classifier considering road and individual characteristics used for detecting cognitive states is trained based on LightGBM algorithm, with 3 predefined cognitive states including concentration, ordinary distraction and extreme distraction.

Rollover accident of heavy vehicle during cornering is a serious road safety problem worldwide. In the past decade, based on the active intervention into the heavy vehicle roll dynamics method, researches have proposed effective anti-roll control schemes to guarantee roll stability during cornering. Among those studies, however, roll stability control strategies are generally derived independent of front steering control inputs, the interactive control characteristic between steering and anti-roll system have not been thoroughly investigated. In this paper, a novel roll stability control structure that considers the interaction between steering and anti-roll system, is presented and discussed.

Although autonomous driving technology has become an emerging research focus, safety is still the most crucial concern when autonomous vehicles leave research laboratory and enter public traffic. Direct yaw moment control (DYC), which differentially brakes the wheels to produce a yaw moment, is an important system to ensure the driving stability of vehicle under extreme conditions. Traditional DYC system must need to take into account driver’s intention and vehicle dynamics. However, for autonomous vehicle, no human is involved in driving process, and enforcing traditional DYC system may conflict with the demands of the desired path. Therefore, in this paper, a novel DYC system for autonomous vehicle is proposed to simultaneously suppress lateral path tracking deviation while maintaining autonomous vehicle stability at or close to the driving limits. In the hardware aspect, an integrated-electro-hydraulic brake (IEHB) actuator scheme is adopted.

With rapid increase of vehicles on the road, safety concerns have become increasingly prominent. Since the leading cause of many traffic accidents is known to be by human drivers, developing autonomous vehicles is considered to be an effective approach to solve the problems above. Although trajectory tracking plays one of the most important roles on autonomous driving, handling the coupling between trajectory-tracking control and ESP under certain driving scenarios remains to be challenging. This paper focuses on trajectory-tracking control considering the role of ESP. A vehicle model is developed with two degrees of freedom, including vehicle lateral, and yaw motions. Based on the proposed model, the vehicle trajectory is separated into both longitudinal and lateral motion. The coupling effect of the vehicle and ESP is analyzed in the paper. The lateral trajectory-tracking algorithm is developed based on the preview follower theory.

Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) are being developed for more and more complicated application scenarios, which often require more predictive strategies with better understanding of driving environment. Taking traffic vehicles’ maneuvers into account can greatly expand the beforehand time span for danger awareness. This paper presents a maneuver-based strategy to vehicle collision threat assessment. First, a maneuver-based trajectory prediction model (MTPM) is built, in which near-future trajectories of ego vehicle and traffic vehicles are estimated with the combination of vehicle’s maneuvers and kinematic models that correspond to every maneuver. The most probable maneuvers of ego vehicle and each traffic vehicles are modeled and inferred via Hidden Markov Models with mixture of Gaussians outputs (GMHMM). Based on the inferred maneuvers, trajectory sets consisting of vehicles’ position and motion states are predicted by kinematic models.

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.

Knowledge of the tire slip ratio can greatly improve vehicle longitudinal stability and its dynamic performance. Most conventional slip ratio observers were mainly designed based on input of non-driven wheel speed and estimated vehicle speed. However, they are not applicable for electric vehicles (EVs) with four in-wheel motors. Also conventional methods on speed estimation via integration of accelerometer signals can often lead to large offset by long-time integral calculation. Further, model uncertainties, including steady state error and unmodeled dynamics, are considered as additive disturbances, and may affect the stability of the system with estimated state error. This paper proposes a novel slip ratio observer based on input-to-state stability (ISS) method for electric vehicles with four-wheel independent driving motors.

When automobiles are at the threat of collisions, steering usually needs shorter longitudinal distance than braking for collision avoidance, especially under the condition of high speed or low adhesion. Thus, more collision accidents can be avoided in the same situation. The steering assistance is in need since the operation is hard for drivers. And considering the dynamic characteristics of vehicles in those maneuvers, the real-time and the accuracy of the assisted algorithms is essential. In view of the above problems, this paper first takes lateral acceleration of the vehicle as the constraint, aiming at the collision avoidance situation of the straight lane and the stable driving inside the curve, and trajectory of the collision avoidance is derived by a quintic polynomial.

Highway traffic safety has been the most serious problem in current society, statistics show that about 70% to 90% of accidents are caused by driver operational errors. The autonomous emergency braking (AEB) is one of important vehicle intelligent safety technologies to avoid or mitigate collision. The AEB system applies the vehicle brakes when a collision is eminent in spite of any reaction by the driver. In some technologies, the system forewarns the driver with an acoustic signal when a collision is still avoidable, but subsequently applies the brakes automatically if the driver fails to respond. This paper presents the development and implementation of a rear-end collision avoidance system based on hierarchical control framework which consists of threat assessment layer, wheel slip ratio control layer and integrated-electro-hydraulic brake (IEHB) actuator control layer.

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.

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 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.

In this paper, we present a model predictive controller for the autonomous vehicle lane-change maneuver. Firstly, an optimal trajectory is generated by polynomial, then, utilize it as the reference trajectory of the controller. It is well known that vehicle with nonholonomic constraints can not be feedback stabilized through continuously differentiable, time-invariant control laws. One of the advantages of MPC is the ability to handle constraints in a straightforward way. Quadratic programming is used to solve a linear MPC by successive linearization of an error model of the vehicle. Due to that the vehicle dynamics model is used, in order to prevent optimal solution cannot be obtained within the prescribed time, the relaxation factor in the objective function.

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.

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 novel approach of developing a vision-based forward collision warning system (FCW) under a virtual and real-time driving environment. The proposed environment mainly includes a 3D high-fidelity virtual driving environment developed with computer graphics technologies, a virtual camera model and a real-time hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) system with a driver simulator. Some preliminary simulation has been conducted to verify that the proposed virtual environment along with the image generated by a virtual camera model is valid with sufficient fidelity, and the real-time HIL development system with driver in the loop is effective in the early design, test and verification of the FCW and other similar ADAS systems.

This paper first presents an algorithm to detect tire blowout based on wheel speed sensor signals, which either reduces the cost for a TPMS or provides a backup in case it fails, and a tire blowout model considering different tire pressure is also built based on the UniTire model. The vehicle dynamic model uses commercial software CarSim. After detecting tire blowout, the active braking control, based on a 2DOF reference model, determines an optimal correcting yaw moment and the braking forces that slow down and stop the vehicle, based on a linear quadratic regulator. Then the braking force commands are further translated into target pressure command for each wheel cylinder to ensure the target braking forces are generated. Some simulations are conducted to verify the active control strategy.