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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.

Lane-changing is a typical traffic scene effecting on road traffic with high request for reliability, robustness and driving comfort to improve the road safety and transportation efficiency. The development of connected autonomous vehicles with V2V communication provide more advanced control strategies to research of lane-changing. Meanwhile, four-wheel steering is an effective way to improve flexibility of vehicle. The front and rear wheels rotate in opposite direction to reduce the turning radius to improve the servo agility operation at the low speed while those rotate in same direction to reduce the probability of the slip accident to improve the stability at the high speed. Hence, this paper established Four-Wheel-Steering(4WS) vehicle dynamic model and quasi real lane-changing scenes to analyze the motion constraints of the vehicles.

Traffic accidents avoidance is one of the main advantages for automated vehicles. As one of the main causes of vehicle collision accidents, lane changing of the ego vehicle in case that the obstacle vehicles appear in the blind spot with uncertain motion intentions is one of the main goals for the automated vehicle. An intention-aware lane changing collision assistance strategy basing on traffic situation assessment in the complex traffic scenarios is proposed in this paper. Typical Regions of Interest (ROI) within the detection range of the blind spots are selected basing on the road topology structures and state space consisting of the ego vehicle and the obstacle vehicles. Then the motion intentions of the obstacle vehicles in ROI are identified basing on Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) and the corresponding motion trajectories are predicted basing on the state equation.

To reduce the interference and conflict of human-machine cooperative control, lighten the operation workload of drivers, and improve the friendliness and acceptability of intelligent vehicles, a personalized human-machine cooperative lane-change trajectory tracking control method was proposed. First, a lane-changing driving data acquisition test was carried out to collect different driving behaviors of different drivers and form the data pool for the machine learning method. Two typical driving behaviors from an aggressive driver and a moderate driver are selected to be studied. Then, a control structure combined by feedforward and feedback control based on Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) and model-based optimum control was introduced. LSTM is a machine learning method that has the ability of memory. It is used to capture the lane-changing behaviors of each driver to achieve personalization. For each driver, a specific personalized controller is trained using his driving data.

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.

Steer-by-wire System is a new conception for steering system, which eliminates those mechanical linkages between hand steering wheel and front wheels, and communicates among the driver and wheels by signals and controllers. All these facilities improve the safety and conformability of the vehicle system and get rid of the mechanical constricts. This paper proposed three vehicle stability control strategies, including front wheel control, yaw rate feedback control and yaw rate& acceleration feedback control. We compared these three control methods by simulation and simulator tests. We also studied the integrated control algorithm of Steer-by-Wire System and 4WS, and compared with 2WS for SBW and the classical 4WS.

Electric Power-Assisted Steering (EPAS) is a new power steering technology that will define the future of vehicle steering. The assist of EPAS is the function of the steering wheel torque and vehicle velocity. The assist characteristic of EPAS is set by control software, which is one of the key issues of EPAS. The straight-line type assist characteristic has been used in some current EPAS products, but its influence on the steering maneuverability and road feel hasn't been explicitly studied in theory. In this paper, the straight-line type assist characteristic is analyzed theoretically. Then a whole vehicle dynamic model used to study the straight-line type assist characteristic is built with ADAMS/Car and validated with DCF (Driver Control Files) mode of ADAMS/Car. Based on the whole vehicle dynamic model, the straight-line type assist characteristic's influence on the steering maneuverability and road feel is investigated.

The steer-by-wire system has been widely studied due to many advantages such as good controllability. In the system, the steering column is cancelled and the driver can't feel the feedback torque (also called steering feeling) coming from the ground. Therefore a steering feeling feedback system is needed. In this paper, we propose a simple method to calculate desired feedback torque based on a nonlinear 2DOF vehicle model. The vehicle model contains the nonlinearity of tire. So that the proposed method is also appropriate for big acceleration conditions. Besides that, the properties of steering system such as friction and stiffness are also taken into consideration. As for conventional steering system, driver can only feel part of the feedback torque due to the power assist system. In order to provide steering feeling similar to conventional steering system, a weighting function is proposed to compensate the influence of power assist system.

With the popularity of electrification and driver assistance systems on vehicle dynamics and controls, the steering performance of the vehicle put forward higher requirements. Thus, the steer-by-wire technology is becoming particularly important. Through specific control algorithm, the steer-by-wire system electronic control unit can receive signals from other sensors on the vehicle, realize the personalized vehicle dynamics control on the basis of understanding the driver’s intention, and grasp the vehicle movement state. At the same time, to make these driver assistance systems better cooperate with human drivers, reduce system frequent false warning, full consideration of mutual adaptation for the systems and the driver’s characteristics is critical. This paper focuses on the steering performance of steer-by-wire vehicle. Feature parameters are obtained from the virtual turning experiment designed on the driving simulator experimental platform.

With rapid development of the automobile industry and the growing maturity of the automotive electronic technologies, the distributed-traction electric vehicle with four-wheel-distributed steering/braking/traction systems is regarded as an important development direction. With its unique chassis structure, it is the ideal benchmark platform used to evaluate active safety systems. The distributed-traction electric vehicle with four-wheel-distributed steering system is essentially full drive-by-wire vehicle. With its flexible chassis layout and high control degrees-of-freedom, the full drive-by-wire electric vehicle acted as a kind of redundant system is an ideal platform for the research of integrated control. In this treatise, the longitudinal dynamics of the electric vehicle as well as its lateral and yaw motions are controlled simultaneously.

On-center handling has drawn lots of attention from consumers and car manufactures for its extraordinarily large effect on vehicle security at high speed. So far, there are a large number of objective evaluation indices for on-center handling, but it is not clear which ones are the key points on evaluation indices. In this paper, the authors propose a simplified on-center handling objective evaluation index system. Firstly, a basic on-center handling objective evaluation index system is summarized based on the ones of ISO, GM, MIRA, TRC and Hyundai, and then dynamics analysis on each index is conducted so as to primarily eliminate the redundant indices. Secondly, the repetitive indices are cut out again by the correlation analysis among indices in objective tests for eight types of vehicles. Thirdly, the importance factor of each subjective evaluation index is gained on the basis of subjective evaluation tests for eight types of vehicles by the weighed principal component analysis.

The EPS motor will be over-heated if large current lasts for a long time, which will decline the performance of EPS motor and even lead to irreparable damage. So the over-temperature protection control should be conducted in order to protect the components of EPS system, especially the durability of EPS motor. In this paper, the motor temperature was estimated according to the environmental temperature and the current of motor armature, and then the EPS assist current was limited based on the estimated temperature of motor to ensure that the EPS motor had a good working condition. So the over-temperature protection control for motor can be realized without increasing the EPS system components. Finally the control strategy for over-temperature protection was conducted in a vehicle with EPS system and its performance was verified.

Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) has a wide range of applications in the military, agriculture, firefighting and other fields. Path planning, as a key aspect of autonomous driving technology, plays an essential role for UGV to accomplish the established driving tasks. At present, there are many global path planning algorithms in grid maps on unstructured roads, while general grid maps do not consider the specific elevation or ground type difference of each grid, and unstructured roads are generally considered as flat and open roads. On the contrary, the unmanned off-road is always a bumpy road with undulating terrain, and meanwhile, the landform is complex and the types of features are diverse. In order to ensure the safety and improve the efficiency of autonomous driving of UGV in off-road environment, this paper proposes a global off-road path planning method for UGV based on the raw image of remote sensing map. Firstly, the raw image is gridded.

Steering movement is the most basic movement of the vehicle, in the car driving process, the driver through the steering wheel has always been to control the direction of the car, in order to achieve their own driving intention. Four Wheel Steering (4WS) is an advanced vehicle control technique which can markedly improve vehicle steering characteristics. Compared with traditional front wheel steering vehicles, 4WS vehicles can steer the front wheels and the rear wheels individually for cornering, according to the vehicle motion states such as the information of vehicle speed, yaw velocity and lateral acceleration. Therefore, 4WS can enhance the handling stability and improve the active safety for vehicles.

When automobile is at the threat of collisions, steering usually needs a shorter longitudinal distance than braking to avoid collision, especially at a high speed. In emergency steering evasion, the vehicle may be out of the road or colliding with obstacles ahead when the driver’s steering torque is excessive or insufficient. In view of the above problems, this paper presents an emergency steering evasion torque assistance system based on optimized trajectory. First, a feasible steering evasion area is established which treats the paths of excessive and insufficient steering as boundary conditions in this paper. An optimized trajectory is derived from the lateral acceleration of the vehicle and the time to the adjacent lane as optimization conditions. Second, a two degree of freedom vehicle model is used to represent dynamics of the vehicle.

This paper reports an effort to improve plan of vehicle trajectory using an approach with rapidly-exploring random trees (RRT), which has been widely adopted in the prior art for complex and dynamic traffic environment. Design and implement of an integrated threat assessment is presented that evaluates threats of the trajectory. A node and trajectory evaluation index was introduced into the proposed RRT algorithm to connect an appropriate node and select the best trajectory. The contribution of this paper is on the threat assessment that takes into account not only obstacle avoidance but also stability. The simulation is conducted and the results show that the proposed method works as expected and is valid and effective.

In the past decades, the stability of vehicles has been improved significantly by use of variety of chassis control systems such as Antilock Braking System (ABS), Electric Stability Program (ESP) and Active Front Steering (AFS). Recently, in order to further improve the performance of vehicles, more and more researches are focused on the integration control of multiple degrees of freedom of vehicle dynamic. However, in order to control multiple degrees of freedom simultaneously, the nonlinear problems caused by the coupling between different degrees of freedom have to be solved, which is always a difficult task. In this paper, a three-degrees-of-freedom single track vehicle model, in which some nonlinear terms are considered, is built firstly. Then, the nonlinear model is processed by the fuzzy technique and the T-S fuzzy model is designed.

This paper proposes a dynamic obstacle avoidance system to help autonomous vehicles drive on high-speed structured roads. The system is mainly composed of trajectory planning and tracking controllers. The potential field (PF) model is introduced to establish a three-dimensional potential field for structured roads and obstacle vehicles. The trajectory planning problem that considers the vehicle’s and tires’ dynamics constraints is transformed into an optimization problem with muti-constraints by combining the model predictive control (MPC) algorithms. The trajectory tracking controller used in this paper is based on the 7 degrees of freedom (DOF) vehicle model and the UniTire tire model, which was discussed in detail in previous work [25, 26]. The controller maintains good trajectory tracking performance even under extreme driving conditions, such as roads with poor adhesion conditions, where the car’s tires enter the nonlinear region easily.

Active steering technology can improve the operability of the driver by the involvement to the steering system. Driver is the major controller of the vehicle Therefore, the involvement of advanced technologies including the active steering technology shouldn’t interfere with the intention of the driver, and the driver should still have great control of the vehicle. The aim of this paper is to solve the problem of the driver’s control when the active steering system works to improve the flexibility of the low speed and the stability of the high speed, and the active steering model based on the driver’s steering intention is established. Through the CarSim simulation software, this paper adopts 9 parameters related to the vehicle steering of the DLC (Double Line Change). And PCA (Principal Component Analysis) algorithm, a tool of statistical analysis, is applied to select 4 parameters which can stand for the DLC from the 9 parameters, which makes the data processing easier.

Roundabouts are one of the most complex traffic environments in urban roads, and a key challenge for intelligent driving decision-making. Deep reinforcement learning, as an emerging solution for intelligent driving decisions, has the advantage of avoiding complex algorithm design and sustainable iteration. For the decision difficulty in roundabout scenarios, this paper proposes an artificial potential field based Soft Actor-Critic (APF-SAC) algorithm. Firstly, based on the Carla simulator and Gym framework, a reinforcement learning simulation system for roundabout driving is built. Secondly, to reduce reinforcement learning exploration difficulty, global path planning and path smoothing algorithms are designed to generate and optimize the path to guide the agent.