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Hybrid and electric vehicle (H/EV) technology is already well established in the automotive industry and a great majority of car manufacturers offer vehicles with alternative propulsion systems (hybrid or electric - H/E). This advancement, however, does not mean that all technical aspects of H/E propulsion systems have already been encapsulated or even fully understood. This statement is specifically valid for regenerative braking technology. In order to regenerate the maximum possible energy, which may be limited in real applications (e.g. by the charging ratio of the energy storage device(s)), the interaction of regenerative braking and the active driving safety systems (ADSSs) such as the anti-lock braking system (ABS) needs to be taken in to account. For maximum recaptured energy via electric motor (E-Motor) braking, the use of regenerative braking, which generates decelerations greater than 0.1g, should be deployed.

Investigations of low drag shapes for passenger vehicles were conducted in the 1930s but production cars of today have yet to approach the potential drag coefficients shown by that early research. Furthermore, the adoption of low drag styles has been resisted because of a perception of compromise to the exterior style and so recent aerodynamic developments have concentrated on changes to non-styled surfaces. However, environmental and ecological pressures are placing increasing demands on manufacturers to produce energy efficient vehicles and the contribution of aerodynamics in that equation is increasing, particularly with the adoption of technologies such as regenerative braking and measurements being made using more real-world use driving cycles. Relying on non-styled surfaces alone for drag reduction is unlikely to be sufficient to deliver the improvements required.

The use of a hydraulic drive system with accumulator energy storage has the potential of providing large gains in fuel economy of internal combustion engine passenger automobiles. The improvement occurs because of efficient regenerative braking and the practicality of decoupling the engine operation from the driving cycle demands. The concept under study uses an engine-driven pump supplying hydraulic power to individual wheel pump/motors (P/M's) and/or an accumulator. Available P/M's have high efficiencies (e.g., 95%) at the ideal point of operation, but the efficiency falls off considerably at combinations of pressure, speed, and displacement that are significantly away from ideal. In order to maximize the fuel economy of the automobile, it is necessary to provide the proper combination of components, system design, and control policies that operate the wheel P/M's as close as possible to their maximum efficiency under all types of driving and braking conditions.

The use of virtual prototyping early in the design stage of a product has gained popularity due to reduced cost and time to market. The state of the art in vehicle simulation has reached a level where full vehicles are analyzed through simulation but major difficulties continue to be present in interfacing the vehicle model with accurate powertrain models and in developing adequate formulations for the contact between tire and terrain (specifically, scenarios such as tire sliding on ice and rolling on sand or other very deformable surfaces). The proposed work focuses on developing a ground vehicle simulation capability by combining several third party packages for vehicle simulation, tire simulation, and powertrain simulation. The long-term goal of this project consists in promoting the Digital Car idea through the development of a reliable and robust simulation capability that will enhance the understanding and control of off-road vehicle performance.

Two major roles of the traction control system (TCS) are to guarantee the acceleration performance and directional stability. This paper proposes a new slip controller which uses the brake and the throttle actuator simultaneously. To avoid measurement problems and get a simple structure, the brake controller is designed using Lyapunov redesign method and the throttle controller is designed using multiple sliding mode control. Through the hybrid use of brake and throttle controllers, the vehicle is insensitive to the variation of the vehicle mass, brake gain and road condition and can achieve required acceleration performance. For the directional stability, a new method to measure the mixture of yaw rate and lateral acceleration with the speed difference of non-driven wheels is proposed. Using this measurement, the controller imposes individual pressure to the driven wheels and can maintain stability in the cornering or the lane change on the slippery road.

This paper describes a method to separate structure-borne noise, which comes from the shock absorber, from the measured vehicle interior sound pressure. The transfer path analysis (TPA) was used. Shock absorber was considered as an input source while the sound pressure at the driver seat as its output. It was found that the sound pressure at the driver seat position and accelerations at the shock absorber mounting points are strongly correlated. Using one-third octave band analysis, the contribution of shock absorber structure-borne noise to the driver seat sound pressure was analyzed. Also the relationship between the measured acceleration and sound pressure was studied.

Using a low-speed high-torque (LSHT) pump/motor to provide the speed range and torque for a hydrostatic automobile offers a number of advantages over using a high-speed low-torque pump/motor, combined with a gear reducer. However, there appear to be no LSHT units commercially available that have true variable displacement capability. Because of this void, a variable displacement pump/motor has been designed and built that could provide a direct drive for each wheel of a hydrostatic automobile. The unit uses some components such as the cylinder block, piston and modified rotating case from a commercially available radial piston pump/motor. Initial preliminary testing of the pump/motor indicates that it has good efficiency and performance characteristics, and, with further development should be very attractive for automotive use. This paper focuses on the design and kinematics of the device.

Conventional steering system has a mechanical connection between the driver and the front tires of the vehicle, but in steer-by-wire system, there is no such a connection. Instead, actuators, positioned in the vehicle's front corners receive input from the control module and turn the front wheels accordingly. In steer-by-wire system, steering wheel is an important part that not only transfers driver's steering input to the controller but also provides a road feedback feeling to the driver's hand. Thus the reactive torque actuator, providing road feedback, plays an important role in steer-by-wire system. In conventional steer-by-wire-system, a motor was used as a reactive torque actuator. But using motor has some disadvantages such as an oscillatory feeling, and improper and potentially dangerous acceleration of the steering wheel by the motor when driver's hands are released from steering wheel abruptly.

Most ground vehicles related accidents occur when the friction demand to perform a maneuver with a certain vehicle and tires exceeds the coefficient of friction of the pavement surface. As generally known, the forces and moments acting on the vehicle body are mainly generated at the tire-road surface interface. The common characteristics of tire forces on any surface include a linear region where the forces vary linearly with respect to the relative slip values; and a nonlinear region where the forces saturate and may even start decreasing. The experience of most of the daily drivers on the roads is limited within this linear region where the dynamic behavior of the vehicle remains proportional to the driver’s inputs. Therefore, an unexpected change in tire or surface characteristics (due to a change in surface friction, large driver inputs, etc.) may easily cause the driver to panic and/or to lose his/her ability to maintain a stable vehicle.

High-powered vehicles offer an advantage of superior fuel economy through use of regenerative braking and lowered transient emissions by reducing the operating portion of the engine to follow load as closely as in a conventional bus. A hybrid bus was designed and a prototype was developed. It has a parallel-type hybrid powertrain system and uses a 6-liter diesel engine which satisfy Euro-5 emission standard. 44-kW-electric motor, AMT (automated manual transmission) and Li-ion-type batteries were applied to this hybrid bus. Total 8 hybrid buses are test-running in 6 cities and the driving performances are monitored in terms of fuel efficiency, emission and convenience. This paper presents the performance, major component features and calibration procedures of hybrid powertrain systems. Test run monitoring result showed a benefit of fuel economy at least 36% by comparing to a conventional diesel-powered bus.

The objective of this study is to develop a neuro controlled active suspension for the ride quality improvement. The performance index of the optimal control is represented as the frequency-shaped using Parseval's theorem. The incorporation of frequency-dependent weighting matrices allow one to emphasize the specific variables related to the vibrations of the specific bands of frequencies. Once the active control law is obtained, we use the artificial neural networks to train the neuro controller to learn the relation of road input and control force. From the numerical results, we found that back propagation learning does good pattern matching and the neuro controlled suspension may reduce the vertical acceleration of the driver's seat and sprung mass motions significantly at desired bands of frequencies.

Brake systems in current production automobiles are the result of a long evolutionary process beginning with the first practical hydraulic brake patent in 1917. While the basic hydraulic design has many advantages, recent modifications to this system for anti-lock braking and traction control considerably increase the cost of manufacture. As a result, many manufacturers are investigating the possibility of developing alternate braking system structures that cost less and can easily interface with vehicle electronics. Evaluating these systems for fault tolerance and failure effects is crucial to provide a safe and reliable vehicle braking system. This paper demonstrates the use of the Fault Tree Analysis method for carrying out such an evaluation. An example system is presented to illustrate the application of this method to automobile brake design.

In this paper, the vibro-acoustic transmission characteristics are investigated in the view point of the airborne noise in the interior cavity due to the tire wall vibrations. The analysis is carried out by categorizing the airborne noise transfer path into the two separate consecutive events. First, the noise transfer from the vibrating tire wall to the exterior car panels is modeled by using the direct boundary element method (BEM). To this end, after discretizing the whole geometry of exterior body panels, tires, and ground into BEM models, vibro-acoustic transfer characteristics are investigated at several frequency components associated with the cavity resonances of tire. Here, cavity resonance frequencies of tire are estimated by BEM and the distribution of tire wall vibrations excited by a special vibro-acoustic source is measured at those frequencies.

Traffic state identification is a key problem in intelligent transportation system. As a new technology, connected and automated vehicle can play a role of identifying traffic state with the installation of onboard sensors. However, research of lane level traffic state identification is relatively lacked. Identifying lane level traffic state is helpful to lane selection in the process of driving and trajectory planning. In addition, traffic state identification precision with low penetration of connected and automated vehicles is relatively low. To fill this gap, this paper proposes a novel method of identifying traffic state in the presence of connected and automated vehicles with low penetration rate. Assuming connected and automated vehicles can obtain information of surrounding vehicles’, we use the perceptible information to estimate imperceptible information, then traffic state of road section can be inferred.

Identifying edge cases for designed algorithms is critical for functional safety in autonomous driving deployment. In order to find the feasible boundary of designed algorithms, simulations are heavily used. However, simulations for autonomous driving validation are expensive due to the requirement of visual rendering, physical simulation, and AI agents. In this case, common sampling techniques, such as Monte Carlo Sampling, become computationally expensive due to their sample inefficiency. To improve sample efficiency and minimize the number of simulations, we propose a tailored active learning approach combining the Support Vector Machine (SVM) and the Gaussian Process Regressor (GPR). The SVM learns the feasible boundary iteratively with a new sampling point via active learning. Active Learning is achieved by using the information of the decision boundary of the current SVM and the uncertainty metric calculated by the GPR.

The design of passive suspension systems is being improved since the early days of the automotive industry in order to obtain the best tradeoff between ride comfort and handling. In this context, passenger cars tend to prioritise ride comfort whilst racing cars tend to focus on handling. On the other hand, Formula SAE is a series of undergraduate competitions in which the students design, build and compete with small, formula-style, mono-seated vehicles. As part of the competition events, the vehicle experiences tight corners and short-length slaloms. The minimum turning diameter and the shortest length of slalom period conducted by Formula SAE prototypes are 9 m and 7.6 m, respectively. Therefore, high controllability of vehicle dynamic behaviour is required in order to enhance the cornering speed, this is achievable by working on the dampers to optimise the rates of load transfer in cornering.

With the development of internet technology and autonomous vehicles (AVs), the multimodal transportation and distribution model based on AVs will be a typical application paradigm in the smart city scenario. Before AVs carry out logistics distribution, it is necessary to plan a reasonable distribution path based on each customer point, and this is also known as Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP). Unlike traditional VRP, the urban logistics distribution process based on multimodal transportation mode will use a set of different types of AVs, mainly including autonomous ground vehicles and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). It is worth pointing out that there is currently no research on combining the planning of AVs distribution paths with the trajectory planning of UAVs. To address this issue, this article establishes a bilevel programming model. The upper-level model aims to plan the optimal delivery plan for AVs, while the lower-level model aims to plan a driving trajectory for UAVs.