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Compared to traditional vehicles, four-wheel independent drive and four-wheel independent steering (4WID-4WIS) vehicles have gained significant attention from researchers due to their enhanced control flexibility and superior handling performance. The steering angle deviation caused by dynamic toe angle changes in two-wheel steering (2WS) systems is often minimal and hence overlooked. However, the impact becomes notably significant in 4WIS systems. This article contrasts the tire slip angle differences between 2WS and 4WIS, and delves into the effects of dynamic toe angle variations on 4WIS control. Solutions are proposed both in terms of steering angle control and suspension design. Firstly, a dynamic model for the 4WID-4WIS vehicle is established. Secondly, a hierarchical tire force distribution strategy is designed for trajectory tracking.

Lane changing is an essential action in commercial vehicles to prevent collisions. However, steering system malfunctions significantly escalate the risk of head-on collisions. With the advancement of intelligent chassis control technologies, some autonomous commercial vehicles are now equipped with a four-wheel independent braking system. This article develops a lane-changing control strategy during steering failures using torque vectoring through brake allocation. The boundaries of lane-changing capabilities under different speeds via brake allocation are also investigated, offering valuable insights for driving safety during emergency evasions when the steering system fails. Firstly, a dual-track vehicle dynamics model is established, considering the non-linearity of the tires. A quintic polynomial approach is employed for lane-changing trajectory planning. Secondly, a hierarchical controller is designed.

Brake judder affects vehicle safety and comfort, making it a key area of research in brake NVH. Transfer path analysis is effective for analyzing and reducing brake judder. However, current studies mainly focus on passenger cars, with limited investigation into commercial vehicles. The complex chassis structures of commercial vehicles involve multiple transfer paths, resulting in extensive data and testing challenges. This hinders the analysis and suppression of brake judder using transfer path analysis. In this study, we propose a simulation-based method to investigate brake judder transfer paths in commercial vehicles. Firstly, road tests were conducted to investigate the brake judder of commercial vehicles. Time-domain analysis, order characteristics analysis, and transfer function analysis between components were performed.

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.

Multiple actuators equipped in electric vehicles, such as four- wheel steering (4WS) and four-wheel drive (4WD), provide more degrees of freedom for chassis motion control. However, developing independent control strategies for distinct actuator types could result in control conflicts, potentially degrading the vehicle's motion performance. To address this issue, a model predictive control (MPC) based steering-drive cooperated control strategy for enhanced agility and stability of electric vehicles with 4WD and 4WS is proposed in this paper. By designing the control constraints within the MPC framework, the strategy enables single-drive control, single-steering control, and steering-drive cooperative control. In the upper control layer, a linear time-varying MPC (LTV-MPC) is designed to generate optimal additional yaw moment and additional steering angles of front and rear wheels to enhance vehicle agility and lateral stability.

This paper focuses on lane-changing trajectory planning and trajectory tracking control in autonomous vehicle technology. Aiming at the lane-changing behavior of autonomous vehicles, this paper proposes a new lane-changing trajectory planning method based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) improved third-order Bezier curve path planning and polynomial curve speed planning. The position of Bezier curve control points is optimized by the particle swarm optimization algorithm, and the lane-changing trajectory is optimized to improve the comfort of lane changing process. Under the constraints of no-collision and vehicle dynamics, the proposed method can ensure that the optimal lane-changing trajectory can be found in different lane-changing scenarios. To verify the feasibility of the above planning algorithm, this paper designs the lateral and longitudinal controllers for trajectory tracking control based on the vehicle dynamic tracking error model.

Applications in commercial and military fields created high demands on the steering performance of multi-axle vehicle. With the characteristic of more degrees of freedom (DOF), all-wheel cooperative steering is more conducive to improve the steering performance of multi-axle vehicle. This paper studies multi-axle vehicle assembled with steer-by-wire system, and proposes a control strategy to achieve all-wheel cooperative steering to improve the low-speed steering flexibility and high-speed steering stability of multi-axle vehicle. Based on the ideal steering performance at low-speed and high-speed, the steady-state gain of multi-axle vehicles at different speeds is reshaped. Also, the corresponding vehicle reference model is constructed to provide the ideal vehicle state as a reference. The precision of the vehicle reference model is verified by an all-wheel independent steering platform.

To tackle the over-actuated and highly nonlinear characteristics that four-wheel-independent-steering and four-wheel-independent -driving (4WIS/4WID) vehicles exhibit when tracking aggressive trajectory, a hierarchical controller with layers of computation-intensive modules is commonly adopted. The high-level linear motion controller commands the desired state derivatives of the vehicle to meet the overall trajectory tracking objectives. Then the system dynamic is inversed by the mid-level control allocation layer and the low-level wheel control layer to map the target state derivatives to steering angle and motor torque commands. However, this type of controller is difficult to implement on the embedded hardware onboard since the nonlinear dynamic inversion is typically solved by nonlinear programming.

In order to realize driving safety in highway scenarios, autonomous vehicles need to predict and reason about the driving intentions and motion trajectories of surrounding target vehicles in the near feature. Essentially, trajectory prediction of target vehicles can be viewed as a typical time series generation problem, which predicts the future trajectory of the vehicle through analyzing the input of historical trajectory information or its control signals. In actual traffic scenarios, the movement between vehicles is a process of mutual game and cooperation, namely the future trajectory of a vehicle is not only related to its own historical trajectory, but also to surrounding vehicles motion. However, different surrounding traffic participants have different influence on the target vehicle, and the future motion of the vehicle is often affected by some specific surrounding traffic agents deeply.

Multiple object detection and tracking are central aspects of modeling the environment of autonomous vehicles. Lidar is a necessary component in the autonomous driving system. Without Lidar sensors, we will most probably not see fully self-driving cars become a reality. Lidar sensing gives us high-resolution data by sending out thousands of laser signals. In advanced driver assistance systems or automated driving systems, 3-D point clouds from lidar scans are typically used to measure physical surfaces. Lidar is a powerful sensor that you can use in challenging environments where other sensors might prove inadequate. Lidar can provide a complete 360-degree view of a scene. This paper designs Lidar based multi-target detection and tracking system based on the traditional point cloud processing method including down-sampling, denoising, segmentation, and clustering objects.

An intelligent connected vehicle (ICV) swarm system that includes N vehicles is considered. Based on the special properties of potential functions, a kinematic model describing the swarm performances is proposed, which allows all vehicles to enclose the tracking target and show both tracking and formation characteristics. Treating the performances as the desired constraints, the analytical form of constraint forces can be obtained inspired by the Udwadia-Kalaba approaches. A special approach of uncertainty decomposition to deal with uncertain interferences is proposed, and a switching-type robust control method is addressed for each vehicle agent in the swarm system. The features and validity of the addressed control are demonstrated in the numerical simulations.

With the widespread application of autonomous driving technology, occupant comfort has become a key topic. Occupant comfort of autonomous vehicles depends on the driving system’s performance, so studying the causes of occupant discomfort will help design driving systems. In addition to the discomfort in NVH and thermal comfort, occupant comfort is also affected by other factors such as safety perception. To study the impact of safety perception on comfort, this paper designed a road experiment and focused on the overtaking scenarios. Because the interaction between the ego vehicle and others is strong during overtaking, the occupants are more likely to receive visual stimuli, resulting in discomfort caused by safety perception. In the experiment, occupant discomfort scores were collected in real-time by the tool developed in this paper.

Recent researches in autonomous driving mainly consider the uncertainty in perception and prediction modules for safety enhancement. However, obstacles which block the field-of-view (FOV) of sensors could generate blind areas and leaves environmental uncertainty a remaining challenge for autonomous vehicles. Current solutions mainly rely on passive obstacles avoidance in path planning instead of active perception to deal with unexplored high-risky areas. In view of the problem, this paper introduces the concept of information entropy, which quantifies uncertain information in the blind area, into the motion planning module of autonomous vehicles. Based on model predictive control (MPC) scheme, the proposed algorithm can plan collision-free trajectories while actively explore unknown areas to minimize environmental uncertainty. Simulation results under various challenging scenarios demonstrate the improvement in safety and comfort with the proposed perception-aware planning scheme.

Aiming at the test safety problems in the early stage of self-driving cars development, firstly the virtual vehicle on-board CAN data acquisition module of the present project was designed based on virtual LabVIEW. Then a wireless remote control system for the self-driving car was constructed, which integrated the built virtual vehicle on-board CAN data acquisition system, the remote real-time image monitoring module and the remote upper computer control module based on ZigBee wireless transmission. It can execute the environmental awareness training and continuous and complex motion manipulation testing of the vehicle without relying on the driver, which can solve the safety problems in the tests of initial development of self-driving cars. Finally, the four-wheel independent steering electric vehicle was used as the self-driving test vehicle, and the wireless remote control system was tested on the double lane change type path and S-type path.

In contrast to a normal vehicle, a 4-wheel steer (4WS) and 4-wheel independent drive (4WID) vehicle provides more flexibilities in vehicle dynamic control and better handling performance, since both the steer angle and drive torque of each wheel can be controlled. However, for motorsports, how much lap time can be improved with such a vehicle is a problem few discussed. So, this paper focuses on the racing line optimization and lap time improvement for a 4WS &4WID vehicle. First, we optimize the racing line and lap time of three given circuits with the genetic algorithm (GA) and interior-point method, and several objective functions are compared. Next, to evaluate the lap time improvement of 4WS & 4WID, a detailed vehicle dynamic model of our 4WS & 4WID platform vehicle is built in Carsim. To follow the racing line, a path following controller which contains a PID speed controller and a model predictive control (MPC) yaw rate controller is built.

A tractor-trailer vehicle (TTV) consists of an actuated tractor attached with several full trailers. Because of its nonlinear and noncompleted constraints, it is a challenging task to avoid collisions for path planner. In this paper, we propose an efficient method to plan an optimal trajectory for TTV to reach the destination without any collision. To deal with the complicated constraints, the trajectory planning problem is formulated as an optimal control problem uniformly, which can be solved by the interior point method. A novel incremental optimization solving algorithm (IOSA) is proposed to accelerate the optimization process, which makes the number of trailers and the size of obstacles increase asynchronously. Simulation experiments are carried out in two scenarios with static obstacles. Compared with other methods, the results show that the planning method with IOSA outperforms in the efficiency.

Lane-changing systems have been developed and applied to improve environmental adaptability of advanced driver assistant system (ADAS) and driver comfort. Lane-changing control consists of three steps: decision making, trajectory planning and trajectory tracking. Current methods are not perfect due to weaknesses such as high computation cost, low robustness to uncertainties, etc. In this paper, a novel lane changing control method is proposed, where lane-changing behavior is analogized to parallel parking behavior. In the perspective of host vehicle with lane-changing intention, the space between vehicles in the target adjacent lane can be regarded as dynamic parking space. A decision making and path planning algorithm of parallel parking is adapted to deal with lane change condition. The adopted algorithm based on rules checks lane-changing feasibility and generates desired path in the moving reference system at the same speed of vehicles in target lane.

Studying drifting dynamics and control could extend the usable state-space beyond handling limits and maximize the potential safety benefits of autonomous vehicles. Distributed electric vehicles provide more possibilities for drifting control with better grip and larger maximum drift angle. Under the state of drifting, the distributed electric vehicle is a typical nonlinear over-actuated system with actuator redundancy, and the coupling of input vectors impedes the direct use of control algorithm of upper. This paper proposes a novel automated drifting controller for the distributed electric vehicle. First, the nonlinear over-actuated system, comprised of driving system, braking system and steering system, is formulated and transformed to a square system through proposed integrative recombination method of control channel, making general nonlinear control algorithms suitable for this system.

Autonomous vehicle performance is increasingly highlighted in many highway driving scenarios, which leads to more priorities to vehicle stability as well as tracking accuracy. In this paper, a nonlinear model predictive controller for autonomous vehicle trajectory tracking is designed and verified through a real-time simulation bench of a virtual test track. The dynamic stability constraints of nonlinear model predictive control (NLMPC) are obtained by a novel quadrilateral stability region criterion instead of the conventional phase plane method using the double-line region. First, a typical lane change scene of overtaking is selected and a new composited trajectory model is proposed as a reference path that combines smoothness of sine wave and comfort of linear functional path. Reference lateral velocity, azimuth angle, yaw rate, and front wheel steering angle are subsequently taken into account.

Automatic Lane Change (ALC) function is an important step to promote the currently popular Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) within a single lane. The key issue for ALC is accurate steering angle and trajectory tracking during the lane changing process. In this paper, an MPC controller with a receding horizon is designed to track the desired trajectory. During the tracking process, other objectives such as safety and smoothness are considered. Considering of the practical mechanism and parameter uncertainties, an SMC controller is designed to track the target steering angle. For validation, a Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) experiment platform is established, and experiments of different control algorithms under different conditions are carried out successively. Comparisons of the experiment results of MPC+SMC and PID+SMC schemes indicate that both the trajectory error and the steering angle error of the former combination are smaller.