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The drivability plays an important role for marketability and competitiveness of passenger car in meeting some customer requirements, which directly affects the driving experience and the desire of purchasing. In this paper, a framework of objective drivability evaluation with multi-source information fusion for passenger car is proposed. At first, according to vehicle powertrain system and optimization theory, certain vehicle performances, which are closely related to objective drivability are analyzed, including vehicle longitudinal acceleration, vehicle speed, engine torque, engine speed, gear position, accelerator pedal, brake signal and voltage signal. Then, combined with the evaluation criterion of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), mean error (ME), root mean squared error (RMSE) and signal smoothness (SS), a de-noising method is developed for the drivability evaluation information.

In automatic driving application, the velocity planner can be considered as a key factor to ensure the safety and comfort. One of the most important tasks of the velocity planner is to simulate the velocity characteristics of human drivers. In this paper, two Driver In-the-Loop (DIL) experiments are designed to explain velocity characteristics of human drivers. In the first experiment, static obstacles are placed on both sides of the straight road to shorten the cross range that vehicles can driver across. Moreover, different cross ranges are set to study the influence of the steering wheel error. In the second experiment, velocity characteristics are investigated under the condition of different road widths and curvatures in a U-turn road contour. In both tests, different drivers’ preview behavior is analyzed through the operation of throttle, braking, and steering.

Magneto-rhelological(MR) dampers are devices that use rheological fluids to modify the mechanical properties of fluid absorber. The mechanical simplicity, high dynamic range, large force capacity, lower power requirements, robustness and safe manner of operation have made MR dampers attractive devices for semi-active real-time control in civil, aerospace and automotive applications. Landing gear is one of the most essential components of the aircraft, which plays an extreme important role in preventing the airframe from vibration and excessive impact forces, improving passenger comfortable characteristics and increasing aircraft flight safety. In this paper, the semi-active system used in landing gear damping controller design, simulation, and the vibration test-bed are discussed and researched. The MR dampers employed in landing gear system were designed, manufactured and characterized as available semi-active actuators.

Vehicle needs suspension and steering systems with different features to fit different driving conditions. In normal straight driving condition, soft suspension and heavy steering systems are needed to achieve better ride comfort and straight line driving stability; in turning conditions, hard suspension and lightweight steering systems are needed to get better handing stability. The semi-active suspension system with Magneto-Rheological dampers can improve the ride comfort and handling performance of vehicle. Electrical power steering system is developed rapidly due to its portable and flexible operations as well as stable steering performance.

Statistical Energy Analysis (SEA) vehicle models are well-accepted tools for predicting the high-frequency interior acoustic effects of a design change to the structure or sound package of the vehicle. [1] SEA models do not strongly depend on geometric details, which allows SEA to be uniquely used as an analysis tool very early in the vehicle design phase to identify potential Noise, Vibration, and Harshness (NVH) issues caused by proposed changes to acoustic or vibration source levels, component materials, construction details, or sound package details of the vehicle. SEA models can also be used to suggest alternatives while the vehicle is still in the development stages to compensate for a predicted or known degradation to NVH in a vehicle due to a design or source level change. This paper presents a case study in which validation testing and an SEA model were combined to obtain recommendations for the most effective sound package changes to meet NVH targets.

Semi-active suspension has been widely applied in commercial vehicle suspension in order to get good riding comfortableness. Fuzzy logic control (FLC) has been widely applied in the field of kinetic control because control rule of FLC is easy to understand. But the gain of fuzzy rules and adjustment of membership functions usually depend on experts' experiences and repeated experiments, thus the fuzzy rules and membership functions has strong subjectivity, also are easily affected by environment of experiments, so the main problem of fuzzy logic controller design is selection and optimization of fuzzy rules and membership functions. Genetic Algorithms (GA) is the algorithm that searches the optimal solution through simulating natural evolutionary process and is one of the evolution algorithms which have most extensive impact.

Hydraulic retarder has been widely applied on military vehicles and heavy commercial vehicles because of it could provide great brake torque and has lasting working time [1]. In order to reduce driver's frequent actions in braking process and prevent hydraulic retarder system from overheating, it is need to apply constant braking torque control, this control target has a strict requirement to hydraulic control system design. Many parameters often require repeated test to determine, which increases the R&D cost and extends the research cycle. This paper tries to find a time-efficient research method of hydraulic retarder control system through studying on a heavy military vehicle hydraulic retarder system. Hydraulic retarder model is set up through test data. The hydraulic control system is built based on AMESim. Controller model is set up based on PID control. The whole vehicle brake model is built based on MATLAB/Simulink.

Road simulation experiment in laboratory is a most important method to enhance the design quality of vehicle products. Presently, two main control techniques for road simulation—remote parameter control (RPC) and minimum variance adaptive control—are both defective: the former becomes an open-loop control after generating the drive signals, however the latter is essentially a kind of gradual control. To realize the closed-loop control and increase the control quality, this article brings forward a PID open-closed loop control method. Firstly taking the original road simulator as a group to identify, a nonlinear autoregressive moving average (NARMA) model was built with the dynamic neural network. Subsequently, this plant model was used to build the open-closed loop control system mentioned above. In the closed-loop a discrete PID controller was introduced to stabilize the system, while a P-type iterative learning control (ILC) was adopted to increase the control quality.

In this paper, a Magneto-Rheological (MR) fluid semi-active suspension system was tested on a commercial vehicle, a domestic light bus, to determine the performance improvements compared to passive suspensions. MR fluid is a material that responds to an applied magnetic field with a significant change in its rheological behavior. When the magnetic field is applied, the properties of such a fluid can change from a free-flowing, low viscosity fluid to a near solid, and this change in properties takes place in a few milliseconds and is fully reversible. A quarter suspension test rig was built out to test the nonlinear performance of MR damper. Based on a large number of experimental data, a phenomenological model of MR damper based on the Bouc-Wen hysteresis model was adopted to predict both the force-displacement behavior and the complex nonlinear force-velocity response.

Automotive Front Lighting System(AFS) can receive the steering signal and the vehicular speed signal to adjust the position of headlamps automatically. AFS will provide drivers more information of front road to protect drivers safe when driving at night. AFS works when there is a steering signal input. However, drivers often need the front road's information before they turn the steering wheel when vehicles are going to go through a sharp corner, AFS will not work in such a situation. This paper studied how to optimize the working time of AFS based on GIS (Geographic Information System) and GPS(Geographic Information System) to solve the problem. This paper analyzed the process of the vehicle is about to go through a corner. Low beams and high beams were discussed respectively.

In this paper a new pressure control method of a modified accumulator-type Electro-hydraulic Braking System (EHB) is proposed. The system is composed of a hydraulic motor pump, an accumulator, an integrated master cylinder, a pedal feel simulator, valves and pipelines. Two pressurizing modes are switched between by-motor and by-accumulator to adapt different pressure boost demands. A differentiator filtering raw sensor signal and calculating pedal speed is designed. By using the pedal feel simulator, the relationship between wheel pressures and brake force is decoupled. The relationships among pedal displacement, pedal force and wheel pressure are calibrated by experiments. A model-based PI controller with predictor is designed to lower the influences caused by delay. Moreover, a self-tuning regulator is introduced to deal with the parameter’s time-varying caused by temperature, brake pads wearing and delay variation.

With the continuous increasing requirements of commercial vehicle weight and speed on highway transportation, conventional friction brake is difficult to meet the braking performance. To ensure the driving safety of the vehicle in the hilly region, the eddy current retarder (ECR) has been widely used due to its fast response, lower prices and convenient installation. ECR brakes the vehicle through the electromagnetic force generated by the current, and converted vehicle mechanical energy into heat through magnetic field. Air cooling structure is often used in the traditional ECR and cooling performance is limited, which causes low braking torque, thermal recession, and low reliability and so on. The water jacket has been equipped outside the eddy current region in this study, and the electric ECR is cooled through the water circulating in the circuit, which prolongs its working time.

In this paper, a novel method is proposed to establish the vehicle yaw stability criterion based on the sideslip angle-yaw rate (β-r) phase plane method. First, nonlinear two degrees of freedom vehicle analysis model is established by adopting the Magic Formula of nonlinear tire model. Then, according to the model in the Matlab/Simulink environment, the β-r phase plane is gained. Emphatically, the effects of different driving conditions (front wheels steering angle, road adhesion coefficient and speed) on the stability boundaries of the phase plane are analyzed. Through a large number of simulation analysis, results show that there are two types of phase plane: curve stability region and diamond stability region, and the judgment method of the vehicle stability domain type under different driving conditions is solved.

Dynamic modeling and state estimation are significant in the trajectory tracking and stability control of the intelligent vehicle. In order to meet the requirement of the stability control of the eight-in-wheel-motor-driven intelligent vehicle, a full vehicle dynamics model with 12 degrees of freedom, including the longitudinal, lateral, yaw and roll motion of the body, and rotational motion of 8 wheels, is established for the research of the intelligent vehicle in this paper. By simulation with MATLAB/SIMULINK and by comparison with the TruckSim software, the reliability and practicality of the dynamics model are verified. Based on the established dynamics model, an extended Kalman filter (EKF) state observer is proposed to estimate the vehicle sideslip angle, roll angle and yaw rate, which are the key parameters to the stability control of the intelligent vehicle.

In order to ensure driving safety, heavy vehicles are often equipped with hydraulic retarder, which provides sustained, stable braking torque and converts the vehicle kinetic energy into heat taken away by the cooling system when traveling on a long downhill. The conventional hydraulic retarder braking torque is modulated by adjusting the liquid filling rate, which leads to slow response and difficult control. In this paper, a new kind of magnetorheological (MR) fluid hydraulic retarder is designed by replacing the traditional transmission oil with MR fluid and arranging the excitation coils outside the working chamber. The braking torque can be controlled by the fluid viscosity of MR fluid with the variation of magnetic field. Compared with the traditional hydraulic retarder, the system has the advantages of fast response, easy control and high adjustment sensitivity.

Brake pedal feel plays an important role in the driver's comprehensive subjective feeling when braking, which directly affects the active safety and riding comfort of passenger car. A systematical mathematical model of the vehicle brake system is built in according with the structure and system characteristics of hydraulic servo brake system. A complete hydraulic servo brake system simulation model composed of brake pedal, vacuum booster, brake master cylinder, brake pipe, brake wheel cylinders, brake calipers is established in AMESim. The effects of rubber reaction plate stiffness, rubber valve opening, brake master cylinder piston, brake caliper, brake pipe deformation and friction liner deformation on brake pedal feel are considered in this model. The accuracy of this model is verified by real road vehicle tests under static and dynamic two different conditions.

A dynamic controller is designed for unmanned skid-steering vehicle. The vehicle speed is controlled through driving torque of engine to achieve the desired vehicle speed and the steering is controlled through hydraulic braking on each side of the vehicle to achieve the desired yaw rate. Contrary to the common approaches by considering non-holonomic constraints, tire slip and saturation of actuators torque influencing the driving and braking are considered, based on the analysis of vehicle dynamic model and nonlinear tire model. Hence, with conditional integrators, the dynamic controller overcoming integral saturation is designed to ensure the accurate tracking for desired signals under influence of tire forces and constraint of actuators. In addition, the exponential kind filter is utilized to enhance the ability of smoothing noise of wheel speed. To perform small radius cornering maneuvers, a dynamic control strategy for steering when vehicle speed is zero is also designed.

This paper presents a novel application of hydraulic electromagnetic energy-regenerative shock absorber (HESA) into commercial vehicle suspension system and vehicle road performance are simulated by the evaluating indexes (e.g. root-mean-square values of vertical acceleration of sprung mass, dynamic tire-ground contact force, suspension deflection and harvested power; maximum values of pitch angle and roll angle). Firstly, the configuration and working principle of HESA are introduced. Then, the damping characteristics of HESA and the seven-degrees-of-freedom vehicle dynamics were modeled respectively before deriving the dynamic characteristics of a vehicle equipped with HESA. The control current is fixed at 7A to match the similar damping effect of traditional damper on the basis of energy conversion method of nonlinear shock absorber.

The current paper proposes a hydraulic interconnected suspension system (HIS) based on a hydraulic energy-regenerative shock absorber (HESA) comparatively with the passive suspensions. The structure and working principles of the HIS system are introduced in order to investigate the damping performance and energy regeneration characteristics of the proposed system. Then, the dynamic characteristics of the HIS-HESA system have been investigated based on a 4-DOF longitudinal half vehicle model. In the simulation, two different road inputs were used in the dynamic characterization of the HIS-HESA; the warp sinusoidal excitation, and the random road signal. In addition, a comparative analysis was provided for the dynamic responses of the half vehicle model for both the HIS-HESA and the conventional suspension. Furthermore, a parametric analysis of the HIS-HESA has been carried out highlining the key parameters that have a remarkable effect on the HIS-HESA performance.

Vehicle sideslip angle estimation is of great importance to the vehicle stability control as it could not be measured directly by ordinary vehicle-mounted sensors. As a result, researchers worldwide have carried out comprehensive research in estimating the vehicle sideslip angle. First, as the attitude would affect the acceleration information measured by the IMU directly, different kinds of vehicle attitude estimation methods with multi-sensor fusion are presented. Then, the estimation algorithms of the vehicle sideslip angle are classified into the following three aspects: kinematic model based method, dynamic model based method, and fusion method. The characteristics of different estimation algorithms are also discussed. Finally, the conclusion and development trend of the sideslip angle estimation are prospected.