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Bicycle-drawn cargo trailers with an electric drive to enable the transportation of high cargo loads are used as part of the last-mile logistics. Depending on the load, the total mass of a trailer can vary between approx. 50 and 250 kg, potentially more than the mass of the towing bicycle. This can result in major changes in acceleration and braking behavior of the overall system. While existing systems are designed primarily to provide sufficient power, improvements are needed in the powertrain control system in terms of driver safety and comfort. Hence, we propose a novel prototype that allows measurement of the tensile force in the drawbar which can subsequently be used to design a superior control system. In this context, a sinusoidal force input from the cyclist to the trailer according to the cadence of the cyclist is observed. The novelty of this research is to analyze whether torque impulses of the cyclist can be reduced with the help of Model Predictive Control (MPC).

Software complexity of vehicles is constantly growing especially with additional autonomous driving features being introduced. This increases the risk for bugs in the system, when the car is delivered. According to a car manufacturer, more than 90% of availability problems corresponding to Electronic Control Unit (ECU) functionality are either caused by software bugs or they can be resolved by applying software updates to overcome hardware issues. The main concern are sporadic errors which are not caught during the development phase since their trigger condition is too unlikely to occur or is not covered by the tests. For such systems, there is a need of safe and secure infield diagnosis. In this paper we present a tool software architecture with remote access, which facilitates standard read/write access, an efficient channel interface for communication and file I/O, and continuous trace.

In order to predict reality as accurately as possible leads to the fact that numerical models in automotive vibroacoustic problems become increasingly high dimensional. This makes applications with a large number of model evaluations, e.g. optimization tasks or uncertainty quantification hard to solve, as they become computationally very expensive. Engineers are thus faced with the challenge of making decisions based on a limited number of model evaluations, which increases the need for data-efficient methods and reduced order models. In this contribution, variational autoencoders (VAEs) are used to reduce the dimensionality of the vibroacoustic model of a vehicle body and to find a low-dimensional latent representation of the system.

In times when automated driving is becoming increasingly relevant, dynamic simulators present an appropriate simulation environment to faithfully reproduce driving scenarios. A realistic replication of driving dynamics is an important criterion to immerse persons in the virtual environments provided by the simulator. Motion Cueing Algorithms (MCAs) compute the simulator’s control input, based on the motions of the simulated vehicle. The technical restrictions of the simulator’s actuators form the main limitation in the execution of these input commands. Typical dynamic simulators consist of a hexapod with six degrees of freedom (DoF) to reproduce the vehicle motion in all dimensions. Since its workspace dimensions are limited, significant improvements in motion capabilities can be achieved by expanding the simulator with redundant DoF by means of additional actuators.

The increasing complexity of automotive functions which are necessary for improved driving assistance systems and automated driving require a change of common vehicle architectures. This includes new concepts for E/E architectures such as a domain-oriented vehicle network based on powerful Domain Control Units (DCUs). These highly integrated controllers consolidate several applications on different safety levels on the same ECU. Hence, the functions depend on a strictly separated and isolated implementation to guarantee a correct behavior. This requires middleware layers which guarantee task isolation and Quality of Service (QoS) communication have to provide several new features, depending on the domain the corresponding control unit is used for. In a first step we identify requirements for a middleware in automotive DCUs. Our goal is to reuse legacy AUTOSAR based code in a multicore domain controller.

Among the issues affecting the design process of a vehicle, there is the lack of multidisciplinary knowledge among the different teams involved. This often leads to the risk of loosing important key points from the initial concept idea of designers to the final vehicle package definition made by engineers. Therefore, this study builds up a method based on parameters defining exterior aesthetic priorities according to car segment to support engineers involved in the automotive design process. In particular, during the early design-engineering phase, this method should help them to understand better vehicle proportions defined by designers. This work is currently used in the course of design and simulation of road vehicles (Chair of Automotive Technology, TUM) to explain fundamentals of automotive design.

In order to reduce emissions of spare ignition engines using a three way catalyst, a stoichiometric air-fuel ratio must be guaranteed in stationary and transient operation of the engine. This aim can be reached by using a specific feed-forward structure for the control of the paths of air and fuel based on identification abilities of Artificial Intelligence. As approximators for multidimensional nonlinear static functions we will use specific Neural Networks (NN) together with sophisticated stability-proven learning structures. The acquired knowledge within the NN determines our control action mainly through using feed-forward structures. Our investigations are based on the so-called mean-value-modelling approach of SI engines; it is our aim to present this strategy.

Existing electronic combustion engine control systems only guarantee a desired air-to-fuel-ratio λ in stationary operation. In order to achieve the desired λ also in in-stationary use of the engine, it is necessary to use new-technology-based control systems. Artificial Intelligence provides methods to cope with difficulties like wide operation range, unknown nonlinearities and time delay. We will propose a strategy for control of a Spark Ignition Engine to determine the mass of air inside the combustion chambers with the highest accuracy. Since Neural Networks are universal approximators for multidimensional nonlinear static functions they can be used effectively for identification and compensation purposes of unknown nonlinearities in closed control loops.

In this paper the design of a robust control system for a parallel hybrid drivetrain is presented The drivetram is based on a continuously variable transmission (CVT) and is therefore a highly nonlinear multiple-input-multiple-output system (MIMO-System) Input-Output-Linearization offers the possibility of linearizing and of decoupling the system Since for example the vehicle mass varies with the load and the efficiency of the gearbox depends strongly on the actual working point, an exact linearization of the plant will mostly fail Therefore a robust control algorithm based on sliding mode is used to control the drivetrain