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In 2006, there were approximately 23,500 rear-end crashes involving heavy trucks (i.e., gross vehicle weight greater than 4,536 kg). The Enhanced Rear Signaling (ERS) for Heavy Trucks project was developed by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) to investigate methods to reduce or mitigate those crashes where a heavy truck has been struck from behind by another vehicle. Visual warnings have been shown to be effective, assuming the following driver is looking directly at the warning display or has his/her eyes drawn to it. A visual warning can be placed where it is needed and it can be designed so that its meaning is nearly unambiguous. FMCSA contracted with the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI) to investigate potential benefit of additional rear warning-light configurations as rear-end crash countermeasures for heavy trucks.

In this research, the interior noise of a passenger car was measured, and the sound quality metrics including sound pressure level, loudness, sharpness, and roughness were calculated. An artificial neural network was designed to successfully apply on automotive interior noise as well as numerous different fields of technology which aim to overcome difficulties of experimentations and save cost, time and workforce. Sound pressure level, loudness, sharpness, and roughness were estimated by using the artificial neural network designed by using the experiment values. The predicted values and experiment results are compared. The comparison results show that the realized artificial intelligence model is an appropriate model to estimate the sound quality of the automotive interior noise. The reliability value is calculated as 0.9995 by using statistical analysis.

Ride control of military vehicles is challenging due to varied terrain and mission requirements such as operating weight. Achieving top speeds on rough terrain is typically considered a key performance parameter, which is always constrained by ride discomfort. Many military vehicles using passive suspensions suffer with compromised performance due to single tuning solution. To further stretch the performance domain to achieving higher speeds on rough roads, semi-active suspensions may offer a wide range of damping possibilities under varying conditions. In this paper, various semi-active control strategies are examined, and improvements have been made, particularly, to the acceleration-driven damper (ADD) strategy to make the approach more robust for varying operating conditions. A seven degrees of freedom ride model and a quarter-car model were developed that were excited by a random road process input modeled using an auto-regressive time series model.

Safety and minimal transit time are vital during transportation of essential commodities and passengers, especially in winter conditions. Icy roads are the worst driving conditions with the least available friction, leaving valuable cargo and precious human lives at stake. The study investigates the available friction at the tire-ice interface due to changes in key operational parameters. Experimental analysis of tractive performance of tires on ice was carried out indoor, using the terramechanics rig located at the Advanced Vehicle Dynamics Laboratory (AVDL) at Virginia Tech. The friction-slip ratio curves obtained from indoor testing were inputted into TruckSIM, defining tire behavior for various ice scenarios and then simulating performance of trucks on ice. The shortcomings of simulations in considering the effects of all the operational parameters result in differences between findings of indoor testing and truck performance simulations.

This paper proposes a new method of predicting the sound absorption performance of polymer wool using artificial neural networks (ANN) model. Some important parameters of the proposed model have been adjusted to best fit the non-linear relationship between the input data and output data. What's more, the commonly used multiple non-linear regression model is built to compare with ANN model in this study. Measurements of the sound absorption coefficient of polymer wool based on transfer function method are also performed to determine the sound absorption performance according to GB/T18696. 2-2002 and ISO10534- 2: 1998 (E) standards. It is founded that predictions of the new model are in good agreement with the experiment results.

In this paper, the performance simulation model of a domestic self-dumping truck was established using AVL-Cruise software. Then its accuracy was checked by the power performance and fuel economy tests which were conducted on the proving ground. The power performance of the self-dumping truck was evaluated through standing start acceleration time from 0 to 70km/h, overtaking acceleration time from 60 to 70km/h, maximum speed and maximum gradeability, while the composite fuel consumption per hundred kilometers was taken as an evaluation index of fuel economy. A L9 orthogonal array was applied to investigate the effect of three matching factors including engine, transmission and final drive, which were considered at three levels, on the power performance and fuel economy of the self-dumping truck. Furthermore, the grey relational grade was proposed to assess the multiple performance responses according to the grey relational analysis.

The road profile has been shown to have significant effects on various vehicle conditions including ride, handling, fatigue or even energy efficiency; as a result it has become a variable of interest in the design and control of numerous vehicle parts. In this study, an integrated state estimation algorithm is proposed that can provide continuous information on road elevation and profile variations, primarily to be used in active suspension controls. A novel tire instrumentation technology (smart tire) is adopted together with a sensor couple of wheel attached accelerometer and suspension deflection sensor as observer inputs. The algorithm utilizes an adaptive Kalman filter (AKF) structure that provides the sprung and unsprung mass displacements to a sliding-mode differentiator, which then yields to the estimation of road elevations and the corresponding road profile along with the quarter car states.

Vehicle analytical models are often favorable due to describing the physical phenomena associated with vehicle operation following from the principles of physics, with explainable mathematical trends and with extendable modeling to other types of vehicle. However, no experimentally validated analytical model has been developed as yet of diesel engine fuel consumption rate. The present paper demonstrates and validates for trucks and light commercial vehicles an analytical model of supercharged diesel engine fuel consumption rate. The study points out with 99.6% coefficient of determination that the average percentage of deviation of the steady speed-based simulated results from the corresponding field data is 3.7% for all Freeway cycles. The paper also shows with 98% coefficient of determination that the average percentage of deviation of the acceleration-based simulated results from the corresponding field data under negative acceleration is 0.12 %.

With the increasingly complex traffic environment, the vehicle AEB system needs to go through a large number of testing processes, in order to drive more safely on the road. For speeding up the development process of AEB and solve the problems of long cycle, high cost and low efficiency in AEB testing, in this paper, a millimeter wave radar turntable is built, and a high-precision detection algorithm of turntable encoder is designed, at the same time, a test method of vehicle AEB based on the detection data of radar turntable encoder is designed. The verification results show that methods described in this paper can be used to develop the vehicle AEB test algorithm efficiently.

To quickly and efficiently match the planetary gearset characteristic parameter of power-spilt hybrid vehicles so that their oil-saving potential can be maximized, this study proposes a parameter matching method that comprehensively considers energy management strategy and driving cycle based on an analysis of vehicle instantaneous efficiency. The method is used to match the planetary characteristic parameter of a power-split hybrid light truck. The relevant conclusions are compared with the influence of various planetary characteristic parameters on fuel consumption obtained through simulation under typical operating conditions. The simulation results show that the influence laws of the various planetary characteristic parameters on vehicle average efficiency are similar to those on fuel consumption. The proposed parameter-matching method based on vehicle efficiency analysis can effectively match the planetary characteristic parameter for power-split hybrid powertrains.

In the face of energy and environmental problems, how to improve the economy of fuel cell vehicles (FCV) effectively and develop intelligent algorithms with higher hydrogen-saving potential are the focus and difficulties of current research. Based on the Toyota Mirai FCV, this paper focuses on the short-term speed prediction algorithm based on the back propagation neural network (BP-NN) and carries out the research on the short-term speed prediction algorithm based on BP-NN. The definition of NN and the basic structure of the neural model are introduced briefly, and the training process of BP-NN is expounded in detail through formula derivation. On this basis, the speed prediction model based on BP-NN is proposed. After that, the parameters of the vehicle speed prediction model, the characteristic parameters of the working condition, and the input and output neurons are selected to determine the topology of the vehicle speed prediction model.

Based on the traditional heavy commercial vehicle, hydraulic hub-motor drive vehicle (HHMDV) is equipped with a hydraulic hub-motor auxiliary drive system, which makes the vehicle change from the rear-wheel drive to the four-wheel drive to improve the traction performance on low-adhesion road. In the typical operating mode of the vehicle, the leakage of the hydraulic system increases because of the oil temperature rising, this makes the control precision of the hydraulic system drop. Therefore, a temperature compensation control strategy for the assist mode is proposed in this paper. According to the principle of flow continuity, considering the loss of the system and the expected wheel speed, the control strategy of multifactor target pump displacement based on temperature compensation is derived. The control strategy is verified by the co-simulation platform of MATLAB/Simulink and AMESim.

Artificial intelligence systems are highly accepted as a technology to offer an alternative way to tackle complex and non-linear problems. They can learn from data, and they are able to handle noisy and incomplete data. Once trained, they can perform prediction and generalization at high speed. The aim of the present study is to propose a novel approach utilizing the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) and the fuzzy clustering method for automotive ride performance estimation. This study investigated the relationship between the automotive ride performance and relative parameters including speed, spring stiffness, damper coefficients, ratios of sprung and unsprung mass. A Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy inference system associated with artificial neuro network was employed. The C-mean fuzzy clustering method was used for grouping the data and identifying membership functions.

Intersection crashes are a frequent and dangerous crash mode in the U.S. Emerging Intersection Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (I-ADAS) aim to assist the driver to mitigate the consequences of vehicle-to-vehicle crashes at intersections. In support of the design and evaluation of such intersection assistance systems, characterization of the road, environment, and drivers associated with intersection crashes is necessary. The objective of this study was to characterize intersection crashes using nationally representative crash databases that contained all severity, serious injury, and fatal crashes. This study utilized four national crash databases: the National Automotive Sampling System, General Estimates System (NASS/GES); the NASS Crashworthiness Data System (CDS); and the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (EARS) and the National Motor Vehicle Crash Causation Survey (NMVCCS).

Taking full advantage of available traffic environment information, making control decisions, and then planning trajectory systematically under structured roads conditions is a critical part of intelligent vehicle. In this article, a lane-changing decision-making method for intelligent vehicle is proposed based on acceleration field. Firstly, an acceleration field related to relative velocity and relative distance was built based on the analysis of braking process, and acceleration was taken as an indicator of safety evaluation. Then, a lane-changing decision method was set up with acceleration field while considering driver’s habits, traffic efficiency and safety. Furthermore, velocity regulation was also introduced in the lane-changing decision method to make it more flexible.

As a novel assist actuator of brake system, the electromechanical brake (EMB) booster has played a significant role in the battery electric vehicles and automatic driving vehicles. It has advantages of independent to vacuum source, active braking, and tuning pedal feeling compared with conventional vacuum brake booster. In this article, a novel EMB booster system is proposed, which is consisted of a permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM), a two-stage reduction by gears and ball screw, a servo body, and a reaction disk. Together with the hydraulic control unit, it has two working modes: active braking for automatic drive and passive braking for driver intervention. The structure and work principle of the electric brake booster system is first introduced. The precise control from pedal force to hydraulic pressure is the key for such a power-assisted brake actuator. We translate the control problem of force feedback control to position tracking control.

Vehicle Longitudinal Control (VLC) algorithm is the basis function of automotive Cruise Control system. The main task of VLC is to achieve a longitudinal acceleration tracking controller, performance requirements of which include fast response and high tracking accuracy. At present, many control methods are used to implement vehicle longitudinal control. However, the existing methods are need to be improved because these methods need a high accurate vehicle dynamic model or a number of experiments to calibrate the parameters of controller, which are time consuming and costly. To overcome the difficulties of controller parameters calibration and accurate vehicle dynamic modeling, a vehicle longitudinal control algorithm based on iterative learning control (ILC) is proposed in this paper. The algorithm works based on the information of input and output of the system, so the method does not require a vehicle dynamics model.

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.

Proper tire pressure is very important for multiple driving performance of a car, and it is necessary to monitor and warn the abnormal tire pressure online. Indirect Tire Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS) monitors the tire pressure based on the wheel speed signals of Anti-lock Braking System (ABS). In this paper, an indirect TPMS method is proposed to estimate the tire pressure according to its resonance frequency of circumferential vibration. Firstly, the errors of ABS wheel speed sensor system caused by the machining tolerance of the tooth ring are estimated based on the measured wheel speed using Recursive Least Squares (RLS) algorithm and the measuring errors are eliminated from the wheel speed signal. Then, the data segments with drive train torsional vibration are found out and eliminated by the methods of correlation analysis.

The high popularity of automobiles has led to frequent collisions. According to the latest statistics of the United Nations, about 1.25 million people worldwide die from road traffic accidents each year. In order to improve the safety of vehicles in driving, the active safety system has become a research hotspot of various car companies and research institutions around the world. Among them, the more mature and popular active security system are Forward Collision Warning(FCW) and Autonomous Emergency Braking(AEB). However, the current active safety system is based on traditional sensors such as radar and camera. Therefore, the system itself has many limitations due to the shortage of traditional sensors. Compared to traditional sensors, Vehicle to Everything (V2X) technology has the advantages of richer vehicle parameter information, no perceived blind spots, dynamic prediction of dangerous vehicle status, and no occlusion restriction.