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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.

Based on the research and analysis of the current brake systems, this paper presents a novel electro-hydraulic brake system, which can better meet the functional requirements. The system mainly contains a master cylinder, two brake hydraulic cylinders and drive motors, two transmission mechanisms, thirteen solenoid valves, pedal force simulator, etc. Since the proposed brake system uses a dual motor along with two brake hydraulic cylinders, it has advantages in providing fast pressure response, flexible working modes, high precision and strong fault tolerance. In order to facilitate the study of pressure control algorithm for the proposed brake system, a mathematical model of the brake system is firstly established, then a multiplexed time-division pressure control algorithm is proposed to realize the simultaneous or partially simultaneous pressure control, which ensures the high precision and short response time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The permanent-magnet DC motor, which is directly connected to the hydraulic pump, is a significant component of hydraulic control unit (HCU) in an anti-lock braking system (ABS). It drives the pump to dump the brake fluid from the low-pressure accumulator back to master cylinder and makes sure the pressure decreases of wheel cylinder in ABS control. Obviously, the motor should run fast enough to provide sufficient power and prevent the low-pressure accumulator from fully charging. However, the pump don't need always run at full speed for the consideration of energy conservation and noise reduction. Therefore, it is necessary to accurately regulate the speed of the DC motor in order to improve quality of ABS control. In this paper, an accurate speed control algorithm was developed for the permanent-magnet DC motor of the ABS to implement the performance of the system, reduce the noise and save the energy in the meanwhile.

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.

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.