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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.

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.

In this paper, a computer model of a multi-purpose vehicle (MPV) is built to study vehicle ride comfort by multi-body system dynamic theory. Virtual test rigs are developed to perform natural body frequency tests and random road input tests on the complete vehicle multi-body dynamic model. By comparing simulation results with field test results, the accuracy of the model is validated and the feasibility of virtual test rigs is established.

With advances in virtual prototyping, accurate digital modeling of driving posture is regarded as a fundamental step in the design of ergonomic driver-seat-cabin systems. Extensive work on driving postures has been carried out focusing on the measurement and prediction of driving postures and the determination of comfortable joint angle ranges. However, studies on postural sensitivity are scarce. The current study investigated whether a driver-selected posture actually represents the most preferred one, by comparing the former with ratings of postures selected at 20 predefined places around the original hip joint center (HJC). An experiment was undertaken in a lab setting, using two distinctive driving package geometries: one for a sedan and the other for an SUV. The 20 postural ratings were compared with that of the initial user-selected position.

3D digital human modeling (DHM) tools for vehicle packaging facilitate ergonomic design and evaluation based on anthropometry, comfort, and force analysis. It is now possible to quickly predict postures and positions for drivers with selected anthropometry based on ergonomics principles. Despite their powerful visual representation technology for human movements and postures, these tools are still questioned with regard to the validity of the output they provide, especially when predictions are made for different populations. Driving postures and positions of two populations (i.e. North Americans and Koreans) were measured in actual and mock-up SUVs to investigate postural differences and evaluate the results provided by a DHM tool. No difference in driving postures was found between different stature groups within the same population. Between the two populations, however, preferred angles differed for three joints (i.e., ankle, thigh, and hip).

Air spring has a variable stiffness characteristic, its vibration frequency is much lower than that of leaf spring and will not vary with load of vehicle. More and more air springs are applied on automobile suspension. A study on the automobile ride comfort, and the controllability and stability about the bus with air suspension is performed in the paper, which is based on multi-body system dynamics.

This paper presents an integrated method for rapid modeling, simulation and virtual evaluation of the interface pressure between driver human body and seat. For simulation of the body-seat interaction and for calculation of the interface pressure, besides body dimensions and material characteristics an important aspect is the posture and position of the driver body with respect to seat. In addition, to ensure accommodation of the results to the target population usually several individuals are simulated, whose body anthropometries cover the scope of the whole population. The multivariate distribution of the body anthropometry and the sampling techniques are usually adopted to generate the individuals and to predict the detailed body dimensions. In biomechanical modeling of human body and seat, the correct element type, the rational settings of the contacts between different parts, the correct exertion of the loads to the calculation field, etc., are also crucial.

This study presents a hybrid optimization approach of TOPSIS-based Taguchi method and entropy measurement for the determination of the optimal suspension parameters to achieve an enhanced compromise among ride comfort, road friendliness which means the extent of damage exerted on the road by the vehicles, and handling stabilities of a self-dumping truck. Firstly, the full multi-body dynamic vehicle model is developed using software ADAMS/Car and the vehicle model is then validated through ride comfort road tests. The performance criterion for ride comfort evaluation is identified as root mean square (RMS) value of frequency weighted acceleration of cab floor, while the road damage coefficient is used for the evaluation of the road-friendliness of a whole vehicle. The lateral acceleration and roll angle of cab were defined as evaluation indices for handling stability performance.

In order to improve ride comfort and reduce interior noise of commercial vehicles, modal sensitivity analysis and optimization design of a commercial vehicle cab was carried out, which increased the first natural frequency of the optimized cab by 23.96%. The result of cab modal test verified the correctness of the finite element model and the effectiveness of the improving method. The structure-acoustic coupling model of the cab was established, and the acoustic response of the coupled sound field was predicted. The sound pressure level of the optimized cab was reduced. In comparison of the optimized cab with the original one, the optimization scheme was confirmed to be effective and reasonable.

Driving assistance system is regarded as an effective method to improve driving safety and comfort and is widely used in automobiles. However, due to the different driving styles of different drivers, their acceptance and comfort of driving assistance systems are also different, which greatly affects the driving experience. The key to solving the problem is to let the system understand the driving style and achieve humanization or personalization. This paper focuses on clustering and identification of different driving styles. In this paper, based on the driver's real vehicle experiment, a driving data acquisition platform was built, meanwhile driving conditions were set and drivers were recruited to collect driving information. In order to facilitate the identification of driving style, the correlation analysis of driving features is conducted and the principal component analysis method is used to reduce the dimension of driving features.

A detailed multi-body dynamic model of a passenger car was modeled using ADAMS/Car and then checked by the ride comfort and handling stability test results in this paper. The performance criterion for ride comfort evaluation was defined as the overall weighted acceleration root mean square (RMS) value of car body floor, while the roll angle and lateral acceleration of car body were considered as evaluation indicators for handling stability performance. Simultaneously, spring stiffness and shock absorber damping coefficients of the front and rear suspensions were taken as the design variables (also called factors), which were considered at three levels. On this basis, a L9 orthogonal array was employed to perform the ride and handling simulations.

In order to study the influence of body flexibility on the truck ride comfort, a 4 DOF half vibration model of truck based on the motion synthesis between rigid body and body flexibility is established using elastic beam theory of equal section with both free ends. At the same time, a corresponding 2 DOF rigid vibration model is also built. The frequency response functions of system and response variables of two models are derived based on front wheel. The power spectral densities and the root mean square values of body acceleration, dynamic deflections and relative dynamic loads are obtained. By comparing the simulation results of rigid-elastic model and rigid model, it shows that body flexibility has a great impact on truck ride comfort and it cannot be ignored.

The wireless inter-vehicle communication provide a manner to achieve multi-vehicle cooperative driving, and the platoon of automotive vehicle can significantly improve traffic efficiency and ensure traffic safety. Previous researches mostly focus on the state of the proceeding vehicle, and transmit information from self to the succeeding vehicle. Nevertheless, this structure possesses high requirements for controller design and shows poor effect in system stability. In this paper, the state of vehicles is not only related to the information of neighbor vehicles, while V2V communication transmit information over a wide range of area. To begin with, the node dynamic model of vehicle is described by linear integrator with inertia delay and the space control strategy is proposed with different topological communication structures as BF, LBF, PBF, etc.

Automobile cabin acoustical comfort is one of the main features that may attract customers to purchase a new car. The acoustic cavity mode of the car has an effect on the acoustical comfort. To identify the factors affecting computing accuracy of the acoustic mode, three different element type and six different element size acoustic finite element models of an automobile passenger compartment are developed and experimentally assessed. The three different element type models are meshed in three different ways, tetrahedral elements, hexahedral elements and node coupling tetrahedral and hexahedral elements (tetra-hexahedral elements). The six different element size models are meshed with hexahedral element varies from 50mm to 75mm. Modal analysis test of the passenger car is conducted using loudspeaker excitation to identify the compartment cavity modes.

The ride comfort of heavy trucks is related to many factors, which include vehicle operating scenarios and vehicle structure parameters. An investigation of the influence of different factors on the ride comfort of heavy trucks was conducted. Based on the elastic theory of a uniform Euler-Bernoulli beam with both ends free, a 6 degree of freedom (DOF) half rigid-elastic vibration model of the vertical dynamic response was developed. The rigid-elastic model is more suitable to describe the actual movement of heavy trucks. The DOFs include vertical displacements of the body and each of two axles, the pitch displacement of the body, and the first and second order bending displacements of the body. The root mean square (RMS) values of body accelerations, dynamic deflections and relative dynamic loads form the evaluation index. Based on the rigid-elastic model, the influence of different factors on the ride comfort of heavy trucks is analyzed in the frequency domain.

With the rapid development of modern economy and society, traffic congestion has become an increasingly serious problem. Vehicle cooperative driving can alleviate traffic congestion and improve road traffic capacity. Compare with vehicle separate control, cooperative driving combines various vehicle systems, and highly integrates information on obstacle location, vehicle status and driving intention. Then the controller uniformly issues instructions to ensure the orderly driving of the platoon. In the cooperative driving platoon, the displacement difference and the speed difference between vehicles have a certain relationship, which reduces the possibility of traffic accidents and then improves the safety of driving. In the process of cooperative driving, if there are multiple vehicles whose speeds don’t meet the current lane requirements, or if there are obstacles ahead, multi-vehicle lane change measures must be taken.

In the field of automatic driving, the combination of 3D LIDAR and inertial measurement unit (IMU) is a common sensor configuration scheme in laser point-cloud localization, high-precision map making and point-cloud target detection. So it is critical to calibrate LIDAR and IMU accurately. At present, due to the large volume and high cost of 3D LIDAR with high-line-number(Such as 64 lines or 128 lines), the configuration scheme of using multiple low-line-number 3D LIDARs appears in the automatic driving vehicle sensing system. However, the common calibration methods are not suitable for multi 3D LIDARs and IMU parameters calibration on autonomous vehicle, which have the disadvantages of cumbersome implementation and low accuracy. In this paper, a joint calibration test platform composed of dual LIDARs and IMU is assembled, and a method of precise automatic calibration based on GPS/RTK data is proposed.

The Electro-Mechanical Brake Booster system (EMBB) is a kind of novel braking booster system, which integrates active braking, regenerative braking, and other functions. It usually composes of a servo motor and the transmission mechanism. EMBB can greatly meet the development needs of vehicle intelligentization and electrification. During active braking, EMBB is required to respond quickly to the braking request and track the target pressure accurately. However, due to the highly nonlinearity of the hydraulic system and EMBB, traditional control algorithms especially for PID algorithm do not work well for pressure control. And a large amount of calibration work is required when applying PID algorithms to pressure control in engineering.

In order to improve the mode switching performance of parallel hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) and make better use of the dynamics of the vehicle, this paper proposes a three-stage control method for the start-up mode of start-up, speed synchronization, and clutch slip based on the response characteristics of actual vehicle components and the complex working conditions of the actual road. In the speed synchronization phase, a coordinated control method of “engine speed active following + continuously variable transmission (CVT) speed ratio motor speed limiting” is proposed. The real vehicle test results show that the engine starting-up coordinated control method can significantly accelerate the speed synchronization and shorten the starting-up mode duration during the rapid acceleration, so that the vehicle’s power performance can be well played and the ride comfort can be effectively guaranteed.

In order to solve the coupling problems between braking safety, economical efficiency of braking and the comfort of drivers, a braking control strategy based on Electronically Controlled Braking System (EBS) and intelligent network technology under non-emergency braking conditions is proposed. The controller utilizes the intelligent network technology’s characteristics of the workshop communication to obtain the driving environment information of the current vehicle firstly, and then calculate the optimal braking deceleration of the vehicle based on optimal control method. The strategy will distribute the braking force according to the ideal braking force distribution condition based on the EBS according to the braking deceleration; the braking force will be converted to braking pressure according to brake characteristics. Computer co-simulations of the proposed strategy are performed, the strategy is verified under different initial speeds.