Search Results

SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) plays a key role in autonomous driving. Recently, 4D Radar has attracted widespread attention because it breaks through the limitations of 3D millimeter wave radar and can simultaneously detect the distance, velocity, horizontal azimuth and elevation azimuth of the target with high resolution. However, there are few studies on 4D Radar in SLAM. In this paper, RI-FGO, a 4D Radar-Inertial SLAM method based on Factor Graph Optimization, is proposed. The RANSAC (Random Sample Consensus) method is used to eliminate the dynamic obstacle points from a single scan, and the ego-motion velocity is estimated from the static point cloud. A 4D Radar velocity factor is constructed in GTSAM to receive the estimated velocity in a single scan as a measurement and directly integrated into the factor graph. The 4D Radar point clouds of consecutive frames are matched as the odometry factor.

The on-ramp merging driving scenario is challenging for achieving the highest-level autonomous driving. Current research using reinforcement learning methods to address the on-ramp merging problem of automated vehicles (AVs) is mainly designed for a single AV, treating other vehicles as part of the environment. This paper proposes a control framework for cooperative on-ramp merging of multiple AVs based on multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL). This framework facilitates AVs on the ramp and adjacent mainline to learn a coordinate control policy for their longitudinal and lateral motions based on the environment observations. Unlike the hierarchical architecture, this paper integrates decision and control into a unified optimal control problem to solve an on-ramp merging strategy through MADRL.

This paper presents an integrated modeling approach for real-time discretionary lane-changing decisions by autonomous vehicles, aiming to achieve human-like behavior. The approach incorporates a two-player normal-form game and a novel risk field method. The normal-form game represents the strategic interactions among traffic participants. It captures the trade-offs between lane-changing benefits and risks based on vehicle motion states during a lane change. By continuously determining the Nash equilibrium of the game at each time step, the model decides when it is appropriate to change the lane. A novel risk field method is integrated with the game to model risks in the game pay-offs. The risk field introduces regions along the desired target lane with different time headway ranges and risk weights, capturing traffic participants' complex risk perceptions and considerations in lane-changing scenarios.

Lane change obstacle avoidance is a common driving scenario for autonomous vehicles. However, existing methods for lane change obstacle avoidance in vehicles decouple path and velocity planning, neglecting the coupling relationship between the path and velocity. Additionally, these methods often do not sufficiently consider the lane change behaviors characteristic of human drivers. In response to these challenges, this paper innovatively applies the Dynamic Movement Primitives (DMPs) algorithm to vehicle trajectory planning and proposes a real-time trajectory planning method that integrates DMPs and Artificial Potential Fields (APFs) algorithm (DMP-Fs) for lane change obstacle avoidance, enabling rapid coordinated planning of both path and velocity. The DMPs algorithm is based on the lane change trajectories of human drivers. Therefore, this paper first collected lane change trajectory samples from on-road vehicle experiments.

Accurate and reliable localization in GNSS-denied environments is critical for autonomous driving. Nevertheless, LiDAR-based and camera-based methods are easily affected by adverse weather conditions such as rain, snow, and fog. The 4D Radar with all-weather performance and high resolution has attracted more interest. Currently, there are few localization algorithms based on 4D Radar, so there is an urgent need to develop reliable and accurate positioning solutions. This paper introduces RIO-Vehicle, a novel tightly coupled 4D Radar/IMU/vehicle dynamics within the factor graph framework. RIO-Vehicle aims to achieve reliable and accurate vehicle state estimation, encompassing position, velocity, and attitude. To enhance the accuracy of relative constraints, we introduce a new integrated IMU/Dynamics pre-integration model that combines a 2D vehicle dynamics model with a 3D kinematics model.

LiDAR and camera fusion have emerged as a promising approach for improving place recognition in robotics and autonomous vehicles. However, most existing approaches often treat sensors separately, overlooking the potential benefits of correlation between them. In this paper, we propose a Cross- Modality Module (CMM) to leverage the potential correlation of LiDAR and camera features for place recognition. Besides, to fully exploit potential of each modality, we propose a Local-Global Fusion Module to supplement global coarse-grained features with local fine-grained features. The experiment results on public datasets demonstrate that our approach effectively improves the average recall by 2.3%, reaching 98.7%, compared with simply stacking of LiDAR and camera.

Radar is playing more and important role in multiple object detection and tracking system due to the fact that Radar can not only determine the velocity instantly but also it is less influenced by environment conditions. However, Radar faces the problem that it has many detection clutter，false alarms and detection results are easily affected by the reflected echoes of road boundary in traffic scenes. Besides this, With the increase of the number of targets and the number of effective echoes, the number of interconnection matrices increases exponentially in joint probability data association, which will seriously affect the real-time and accuracy of high-speed scene algorithms.in the tracking system. So, A method of using millimeter wave radar to detect and fit the boundary guardrail of high-speed road is proposed, and the fitting results are applied to the vehicle detection and tracking system to improve the tracking accuracy.

On account of the insufficient lane-changing scenario test cases and the inability to conduct graded evaluation testing in current autonomous driving system field testing, this paper proposed an approach that combined data-driven and knowledge-driven methods to extract lane-changing test concrete scenarios with graded risk levels for field testing. Firstly, an analysis of the potentially hazardous areas in lane-changing scenarios was conducted to derive key functional lane-changing scenarios. Three typical key functional lane-changing scenarios were selected, namely, lane-changing with a preceding vehicle braking, lane-changing with a preceding vehicle in the same direction, and lane-changing with a rear cruising vehicle in the adjacent lane, and their corresponding safety goals were respectively analyzed. Secondly, the GAMAB criterion was introduced as an evaluation standard for autonomous driving systems.

Positioning system is a key module of autonomous driving. As for LiDAR SLAM system, it faces great challenges in scenarios where there are repetitive and sparse features. Without loop closure or measurements from other sensors, odometry match errors or accumulated errors cannot be corrected. This paper proposes a construction method of LiDAR anchor constraints to improve the robustness of the SLAM system in the above challenging environment. We propose a robust anchor extraction method that adaptively extracts suitable cylindrical anchors in the environment, such as tree trunks, light poles, etc. Skewed tree trunks are detected by feature differences between laser lines. Boundary points on cylinders are removed to avoid misleading. After the appropriate anchors are detected, a factor graph-based anchor constraint construction method is designed. Where direct scans are made to anchor, direct constraints are constructed.

Optimization design of hard point parameters for hinge mechanism has been paid more attention in recent years, attributable to their significant improvement in dynamic performance. In this paper, the experimental analysis and dynamic optimization design of hinge mechanism is performed. The acceleration measurement experiments are carried out at different arrangement points and under different working conditions. Furthermore, the accuracy of established multi-body dynamics model is verified by three-axis accelerometer measurement experiment. In addition, sensitivity analysis for electric strut and gas strut coordinates is performed and shows that the Y coordinate of the lower end point of the electric strut is the design variable that has the greatest impact on the responses.

The driver monitoring system (DMS) plays an essential role in reducing traffic accidents caused by human errors due to driver distraction and fatigue. The vision-based DMS has been the most widely used because of its advantages of non-contact and high recognition accuracy. However, the traditional RGB camera-based DMS has poor recognition accuracy under complex lighting conditions, while the IR-based DMS has a high cost. In order to improve the recognition accuracy of conventional RGB camera-based DMS under complicated illumination conditions, this paper proposes a lightweight low-illumination image enhancement network inspired by the Retinex theory. The lightweight aspect of the network structure is realized by introducing a pixel-wise adjustment function. In addition, the optimization bottleneck problem is solved by introducing the shortcut mechanism.

Aiming at the laborious process in motor structure modeling for acoustic noise calculation, an improved stator structure modeling scheme is proposed, which includes stator structure simplification and equivalent material parameters identification. The stator assembly is modeled as a homogeneous solid with the same size as the stator core, and the influence of model simplification is compensated by orthotropic equivalent material parameters. The equivalent material parameters are acquired through an optimization algorithm by minimizing the error between FEM calculated modal frequencies and the modal tested results. With the stator assembly model, the motor assembly model is built, and the constrained modal characteristics of the motor assembly are verified by comparing the modal frequencies to the resonance bands in the vibration acceleration spectrum. Finally, the motor structure model is used to calculate the electromagnetic noise of an induction motor.

Harmony-with-traffic refers to the ability of autonomous vehicles to maximize the driving benefits such as comfort, efficiency, and energy consumption of themselves and the surrounding traffic during interactive driving under traffic rules. In the test of harmony-with-traffic, one or more background vehicles that can respond to the driving behavior of the vehicle under test are required. For this purpose, the functional requirements of car-following model for harmony-with-traffic evaluation are analyzed from the dimensions of test conditions, constraints, steady state and dynamic response. Based on them, an interactive car-following model (ICFM) is developed. In this model, the concept of equivalent distance is proposed to transfer lateral influence to longitudinal. The calculation methods of expected speed are designed according to the different car-following modes divided by interaction object, reaction distance and equivalent distance.

With the popularity of automated vehicles, the future mixed traffic flow contains automated vehicles with different degrees of intelligence developed by other manufacturers. Therefore, simulating the interaction behavior of automated vehicles with varying levels of intelligence is crucial for testing and evaluating autonomous driving systems. Since the algorithm of traffic vehicles with various intelligence levels is difficult to obtain, it leads to hardships in quantitatively characterizing their interaction behaviors. Therefore, this paper designs a new automated vehicle test platform to solve the problem. The intelligent vehicle testbed with multiple personalized in-vehicle control units in the loop consists of three parts: 1. Multiple controllers in the loop to simulate the behavior of traffic vehicles；2. The central console applies digital twin technology to share the same traffic scenario between the tested vehicle and the traffic vehicle, creating a mixed traffic flow. 3.

There are often a large number of design variables and responses in suspension hard point optimization design. The traditional optimization strategy integrating heuristic algorithm and simulation model is not applicable due to its low efficiency. To solve optimization problems with huge number of design variables and responses, a multi-objective optimization framework combined heuristic optimization algorithm with multi-objective decision-making method is developed. Specifically, the multi-objective optimization was performed by dividing the problem into two independent sub-problems of multi-objective optimization and multi-objective decision-making. Further, to reduce the number of sample points required for building a surrogate model, a two-stage multi-objective optimization is proposed.

Subframe is an important part of automobile chassis, which is connected with body, suspension control arm, powertrain mount, etc. The dynamic stiffness value of the connection point is an important performance index of the subframe, which affects the vibration of the vehicle body. This paper introduces the basic concept and related theory of dynamic stiffness, derives the theoretical formula of dynamic stiffness, and analyzes the frequency response of the key points of the subframe. In view of the fact that the dynamic stiffness of the subframe of a certain vehicle model is not up to the standard at some connection points, the dynamic stiffness CAE simulation analysis is carried out to determine the frequency range of insufficient dynamic stiffness and the connection points that need to be optimized.

High-speed vehicles in low illumination environments severely blur the images used in object detectors, which poses a potential threat to object detector-based advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving systems. Augmenting the training images for object detectors is an efficient way to mitigate the threat from motion blur. However, little attention has been paid to the motion of the vehicle and the position of objects in the traffic scene, which limits the consistence between the resulting augmented images and traffic scenes. In this paper, we present a vehicle kinematics-based image augmentation algorithm by modeling and analyzing the traffic scenes to generate more realistic augmented images and achieve higher robustness improvement on object detectors against motion blur. Firstly, we propose a traffic scene model considering vehicle motion and the relationship between the vehicle and the object in the traffic scene.

Image corruptions due to noise, blur, contrast change, etc., could lead to a significant performance decline of Deep Neural Networks (DNN), which poses a potential threat to DNN-based autonomous vehicles. Previous works attempted to explain corruption from a Fourier perspective. By comparing the absolute Fourier spectrum difference between corrupted images and clean images in the RGB color space, they regard the noise from some corruptions (Gaussian noise, defocus blur, etc.) as concentrating on the high-frequency components while others (contrast, fog, etc.) concentrate on the low-frequency components. In this work, we present a new perspective that unifies corruptions as noise from high frequency and thus propose an image augmentation algorithm to achieve a more robust performance against common corruptions. First, we notice the 1/fα statistical rule of the natural image's spectrum and the channels-wise differential sensitivity on the YCbCr color space of the Human Visual System.

To overcome the shortcoming that vehicles with multiple steering modes need to switch steering modes at parking or very low speeds, a dynamic switch method of steering modes based on MOEA/D (Multi-objective Evolutionary Algorithm Based on Decomposition) was proposed for 4WID-4WIS (Four Wheel Independent Drive-Four Wheel Independent Steering) electric vehicle, considering the smoothness of dynamic switch, the lateral stability of the vehicle and the energy economy of tires. First of all, the vehicle model of 4WID-4WIS was established, and steering modes were introduced and analyzed. Secondly, the conditions for the dynamic switch of steering modes were designed with the goal of stability and safety. According to different constraints, the control strategy was formulated to obtain the target angle of the active wheels. Then aiming at the smoothness of the dynamic switch, the active wheel angle trajectory was constructed based on the B-spline theory.