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Electric vehicle (EV) has been regarded as not only an effective solution for environmental issues but also a more controllable and responsible device to driving forces with electric motors and precise torque measurement. For electric vehicle equipped with four in-wheel motors, its tire longitudinal forces can be generated independently and individually with fully utilized tire adhesion at each corner. This type of the electric vehicles has a distributed drive system, and often regarded as an over-actuated system since the number of actuators in general exceeds the control variables. Control allocation (CA) is often considered as an effective means for the control of over-actuated systems. The in-vehicle network technology has been one of the major enablers for the distributed drive systems. The vehicle studied in this research has an electrohydraulic brake system (EHB) on front axle, while an electromechanical brake system (EMB) on rear axle.

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.

Adaptive cruise control (ACC), as one of the advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), has become increasingly popular in improving both driving safety and comfort. Since the objectives of ACC can be multi-dimensional, and often conflict with each other, it is a challenging task in its control design. The research presented in this paper takes ACC control design as a constrained optimization problem with multiple objectives. A hierarchical framework for ACC control is introduced, aimed to achieve optimal performance on driving safety and comfort, speed and/or distance tracking, and fuel economy whenever possible. Under the hierarchical framework, the operational mode is determined in the upper layer, in which a model predictive control (MPC) based spacing controller is employed to deal with the multiple control objectives. On the other hand, the lower layer is for actuator control, such as braking and driving control for vehicle longitudinal dynamics.

Tire-pavement interaction noise (TPIN) is a dominant source for passenger cars and trucks above 40 km/h and 70 km/h, respectively. TPIN is mainly generated from the interaction between the tire and the pavement. In this paper, twenty-two passenger car radial (PCR) tires of the same size (16 in. radius) but with different tread patterns were tested on a non-porous asphalt pavement. For each tire, the noise data were collected using an on-board sound intensity (OBSI) system at five speeds in the range from 45 to 65 mph (from 72 to 105 km/h). The OBSI system used an optical sensor to record a once-per-revolution signal to monitor the vehicle speed. This signal was also used to perform order tracking analysis to break down the total tire noise into two components: tread pattern-related noise and non-tread pattern-related noise.

In order to improve drivers’ acceptance to advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) with better adaptation, drivers’ driving behavior should play key role in the design of control strategy. Adaptive cruise control systems (ACC) have many factors that can be influenced by different driving behavior. It is important to recognize drivers’ driving behavior and take human-like parameters to the adaptive cruise control systems to assist different drivers effectively via their driving characteristics. The paper proposed a method to recognize drivers’ behavior and intention based on Gaussian Mixture Model. By means of a fuzzy PID control method, a personalized ACC control strategy was designed for different kinds of drivers to improve the adaptabilities of the systems. Several typical testing scenarios of longitudinal case were created with a host vehicle and a traffic vehicle.

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.

One of the principal goals of modern vehicle control systems is to ensure passenger safety during dangerous maneuvers. Their effectiveness relies on providing appropriate parameter inputs. Tire-road contact forces are among the most important because they provide helpful information that could be used to mitigate vehicle instabilities. Unfortunately, measuring these forces requires expensive instrumentation and is not suitable for commercial vehicles. Thus, accurately estimating them is a crucial task. In this work, two estimation approaches are compared, an observer method and a neural network learning technique. Both predict the lateral and longitudinal tire-road contact forces. The observer approach takes into account system nonlinearities and estimates the stochastic states by using an extended Kalman filter technique to perform data fusion based on the popular bicycle model.

Minimum energy consumption with maximum comfort driving experience define the ideal human mobility. Recent technological advances in most Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) on electric vehicles not only present a significant opportunity for automated eco-driving but also enhance the safety and comfort level. Understanding driving styles that make the systems more human-like or personalized for ADAS is the key to improve the system comfort. This research focuses on the personalized and green adaptive cruise control for intelligent electric vehicle, which is also known to be MyEco-ACC. MyEco-ACC is based on the optimization of regenerative braking and typical driving styles. Firstly, a driving style model is abstracted as a Hammerstein model and its key parameters vary with different driving styles. Secondly, the regenerative braking system characteristics for the electric vehicle equipped with 4-wheel hub motors are analyzed and braking force distribution strategy is designed.

The electro-mechanical brake booster (EMBB) and hydraulic control unit (HCU) constitute the electro-mechanical brake system, which can meet the requirements of brake system for intelligent vehicles. It does not need vacuum source, provides active braking function, have high control accuracy and fast response. But it has two electronic control units (ECU), which need coordinated control. When ABS is triggered, the pressure of the master cylinder keeps rising and falling, and the pressure fluctuates greatly. This will lead to noise and reduce the durability of the system. In this paper, a pressure optimization control strategy under ABS condition is proposed. Firstly, the structure and control strategy of EMBB are introduced. Secondly, the braking characteristics without pressure optimization control are analyzed. Thirdly, based on the demand of maximum cylinder pressure, a three-closed-loop pressure optimization control strategy is established.

With the development of modern vehicle chassis control systems, such as Anti-Lock Brake System (ABS), Acceleration Slip Regulation (ASR), Electronic Stability Control (ESC), and Regenerative Braking System (RBS) for EVs, etc., there comes a new requirement for the vehicle brake system that is the precise control of the wheel brake pressure. The Electro-Hydraulic Brake system (EHB), which owns an ability to adjust four wheels’ brake pressure independently, can be a good match with these systems. However, the traditional control logic of EHB is based on the PWM (Pulse-Width Modulation), which has a low control accuracy of linear electromagnetic valves. Therefore, this paper presents a research of the linear electro-magnetic valve characteristic analysis, and proposes a precise pressure control algorithm of the EHB system with a feed forward and a PID control of linear electro-magnetic valves.

Nowadays, the vehicle market puts forward urgent requirement for new kinds of braking booster because the traditional vacuum booster cannot meet the demands of new energy vehicles anymore. However, one problem that all the new plans should face is how to guarantee an ideal pedal feeling. In this paper, a novel mechatronics braking booster is proposed, and servo motor introduced into the booster makes the assist rate can be adjusted under a great degrees of freedom, so the structural parameters and control parameters of the booster should be determined elaborately to get an optimal pedal feeling. The pedal feeling is always represented by the pedal stoke-force curve which is influenced by different parameters.

Tire modeling plays an important role in the development of an Active Vehicle Safety System. As part of a larger project that aims at developing an integrated chassis control system, this study investigates the performance of a 19” all-season tire on ice for a sport utility vehicle. A design of experiment has been formulated to quantify the effect of operational parameters, specifically: wheel slip, normal load, and inflation pressure on the tire tractive performance. The experimental work was conducted on the Terramechanics Rig in the Advanced Vehicle Dynamics Laboratory at Virginia Tech. The paper investigates an approach for the parameterization of the Dugoff tire model based on the experimental data collected. Compared to other models, this model is attractive in terms of its simplicity, low number of parameters, and easy implementation for real-time applications.

This paper presents a power assisted braking control based on a novel mechatronic booster system. A brake pedal feel control unit is first discussed which includes a pedal emulator with an angular sensor to detect driver’s pedal travel, a signal processing module with a Kalman filter for sensor signal conditioning, and a driver braking intention detection and behavior recognition module based on the displacement and velocity of the pedal travel. A power assisted braking control is then presented as the core of the system which consists of controls on basic power assist, velocity compensation and friction compensation. The friction is estimated based on a generic algorithm offline. A motor controller is designed to provide the desired torque for the power assist. Finally, a novel mechatronic booster system is designed and built with an experimental platform set up with a widely adopted rapid prototype system using dSPACE products, such as MicroAutoBox, RapidPro, etc.