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During the launch of a car, severe torsional vibration sometimes may occur in its driveline due to somewhat the slipping of the clutch, its intuitive sense for an occupant is the longitudinal vibration of the vehicle, referred to as the launch shudder whose characteristic frequency is from 5 to 25 Hz generally. As the main vibration sources of the driveline and its crucial nonlinear components, the variable stiffness and backlash of the gear meshing are considered, their impacts on the launch shudder are analyzed in this paper. Conformal mapping, finite element method and regression method etc. are the main approaches to calculate the variable meshing stiffness of a gear pair. If this stiffness is get, it can usually be substituted for its approximate analytical expression, just with finite harmonic terms, in Fourier Series form into Ordinary Differential Equations(ODEs) to calculate the vehicle responses with its nonlinearity considered.

Environmental perception is a crucial subsystem in autonomous vehicles. In order to build safe and efficient traffic transportation, several researches have been proposed to build accurate, robust and real-time perception systems. Camera and LiDAR are widely equipped on autonomous self-driving cars and developed with many algorithms in recent years. The fusion system of camera and LiDAR provides state-of the-art methods for environmental perception due to the defects of single vehicular sensor. Extrinsic parameter calibration is able to align the coordinate systems of sensors and has been drawing enormous attention. However, differ from spatial alignment of two sensors’ data, joint calibration of multi-sensors (more than two sensors) should balance the degree of alignment between each two sensors.

Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) with relatively high energy, power density and eco-friendly characteristic are considered as a vital energy source in consumer market of portable electronics and transportation sector especially in electric vehicles (EVs). To meet the higher capacity requirements, the nickel-rich LIBs with higher capacity has been used as the commercial power batteries. However, the battery with higher energy density is more destructive, which could result in thermal runaway accidents and make the battery safety issues become more and more prominent. Thermal runaway of LIBs is one of the key scientific problems in safety issues. Until now, the inducement of thermal runaway process is complicated which perplex researchers and industry a lot. On the one hand, the internal mechanism about thermal runaway should be deeply studied. On the other hand, in-situ monitoring should be developed to supply the mechanism study and early warning.

In order to explore approaches for improving object detection accuracy in intelligent vehicle system, we exploit super-resolution techniques. A novel method is proposed to confirm the conjecture whether some popular super-resolution networks used for environmental perception of intelligent vehicles and robots can indeed improve the detection accuracy. COCO dataset which contains images from complex ordinary environment is utilized for the verification experiment, due to it can adequately verify the generalization of each algorithm and the consistency of experimental results. Using two representative object detection networks to produce the detection results, namely Faster R-CNN and YOLOv3, we devise to reduce the impact of resizing operation. The two networks allow us to compare the performance of object detection between using original and super-resolved images. We quantify the effect of each super-resolution techniques as well.

A Controllable Active Thermo-Atmosphere (CATA) Combustor enables the investigation of stabilization mechanisms in an environment that decouples the turbulent chemical kinetics from the complex recirculating flow. Previous studies on combustion of the low-pressure fuel jets in the Controllable Active Thermo-Atmosphere (CATA) showed non-linear effect of coflow temperature on autoignition delay and the randomness of autoignition sites. In this work, a diesel spray is injected into the CATA with the injection pressure at 20MPa from a single-hole injector and the autoignition and combustion process of the spray is recorded by a high-speed camera video. The multipoint autoignition of diesel spray is observed in the CATA and the subsequent combustion process is analyzed. The results show that autoignition phenomenon plays an important role in the stabilization of the lifted flames of diesel spray under low coflow temperature.

A computational study was conducted in order to characterize the heat transfers in a sedan vehicle underbody and the exhaust system. A steady-state analysis with consideration for both the radiation and conjugate heat transfers was undertaken using the High-Reynolds formulation of the k-epsilon turbulence model with standard wall function and the DO model for the radiation heat transfer. All three mechanisms of heat transfer, i.e., convection, conduction, and radiation, were included in the analysis. The convective heat transfer due to turbulent fluid motion was modeled with the assumption of constant turbulent Prandtl number; and heat conduction was solved directly for both fluid and solid.

For sensing system, the trustworthiness of the variant sensors is the crucial point when dealing with advanced driving assistant system application. In this paper, an approach to a hybrid camera-radar application of vehicle tracking is presented, able to meet the requirement of such demand. Most of the time, different types of commercial sensors available nowadays specialize in different situations, such as the ability of offering a wealth of detailed information about the scene for the camera or the powerful resistance to the severe weather for the millimeter-wave (MMW) radar. The detection and tracking in different sensors are usually independent. Thus, the work here that combines the variant information provided by different sensors is indispensable and worthwhile. For the real-time requirement of merging the measurement of automotive MMW radar in high speed, this paper first proposes a fast vehicle tracking algorithm based on image perceptual hash encoding.

A specially designed generator has been developed to produce poly-disperse droplet streams: A liquid fuel (n-heptane) is metered to an ultrasonic atomizer to produce droplets, which are then carried and accelerated vertically upwards through a nozzle tube by carrier-air flow. Conditions of the streams at the nozzle exit are modulated by varying the length of nozzle tubes, the fuel and carrier-air flow rate. Optical measurement techniques such as direct photography method, schlieren photography and particle image velocimetry (PIV) are employed to characterize its performance characteristics. Effects of the nozzle tube length, the carrier-air and fuel flow rate are investigated to evaluate the performance of the generator. Longer nozzle tubes provide a better flow guidance for the carrier-air, and tend to generate streams with less and smaller droplets due to the transporting losses.

In this study, effects of altitude on free diesel spray morphology, macroscopic spray characteristics and air-fuel mixing process were investigated. The diesel spray visualization experiment using high-speed photography was performed in a constant volume chamber which reproduced the injection diesel-like thermodynamic conditions of a heavy-duty turbocharged diesel engine operating at sea level and 1000 m, 2000 m, 3000 m and 4500 m above sea level. The results showed that the spray morphology became narrower and longer at higher altitude, and small vortex-like structures were observed on the downstream spray periphery. Spray penetration increased and spray angle decreased with increasing altitude. At altitudes of 0 m, 1000 m, 2000 m, 3000 m and 4500 m, the spray penetration at 1.45 ms after start of injection (ASOI) were 79.54 mm, 80.51 mm, 81.49 mm, 83.29 mm and 88.92 mm respectively, and the spray angle were 10.9°, 10.8°, 10.7°, 10.4°and 9.8° respectively.

Automotive embedded DCS is widely used to solve automotive control problems. This paper presents a model-driven development technology for such systems. Models of automotive embedded DCS are built up strictly complying with the four-layer-model architecture, which is presented by Model-Driven Architecture (MDA). Three kinds of models are used to describe the protocol data structure, the algorithm process and visualization aspects of automotive embedded DCS. Corresponding XML databases are created based upon these models. As a single data source, these databases play key roles in further development phases, including generating the protocol specification, MC&D systems and embedded programming, etc. Some demonstrative applications are presented in this paper.

Lane marking detection plays a crucial role in Autonomous Driving Systems or Advanced Driving Assistance System. Vision based lane marking detection technology has been well discussed and put into practical application. LiDAR is more stable for challenging environment compared to cameras, and with the development of LiDAR technology, price and lifetime are no longer an issue. We propose a lane marking detection algorithm based on solid-state LiDARs. First a series of data pre-processing operations were done for the solid-state LiDARs with small field of view, and the needed ground points are extracted by the RANSAC method. Then, based on the OTSU method, we propose an approach for extracting lane marking points using intensity information.

Hydrous ethanol not only has the advantages of high-octane number and valuable oxygen content, but also reduce the energy consumption in the production process. However, little literature investigated the internal flow and cavitation of hydrous ethanol-gasoline fuels in the multi-hole direct injector. In this simulation, a two-phase fuel flow model in injector is established based on the multi-fluid model of Euler-Euler method, and the accuracy of model is verified. On the basis of this model, the flow of different hydrous ethanol-gasoline blends is calculated under different injection conditions, and the cavitation, flow rate, and velocity at the outlet of the nozzle are predicted. Meanwhile, the influence of temperature and back pressure on the flow is also analyzed. The results show that the use of hydrous ethanol reduces the flow rate, compared with the velocity of E0, that of E10w, E20w, E50w, E85w, and E100w decreases by 10%, 12.9%, 17.6%, 20%, and 23.5%, respectively.

Centrifugal Pendulum Vibration Absorber (CPVA for short) is used to absorb torsional vibrations caused by the shifting motion of the engine. It is increasingly used in modern powertrains. In the research of the dynamic characteristics of the CPVA, it is necessary to obtain the real motion of the pendulum to compensate the fitting performance of mathematical model. The usual method is to install an angle sensor to measure the movement of the pendulum. On the one hand, the installation of the sensor will affect its movement to a certain extent, so that the measurement results do not match the actual motion. On the other hand, the motion of the pendulum is not only the rotational motion around the rotational axis of the CPVA rotor, but also has translation relative to it. As a result, it is difficult to obtain accurate motion only by the angle sensor. We proposed a non-contact centrifugal pendulum motion measurement method.

High-speed vehicles in low illumination environments severely blur the images used in object detectors, which poses a potential threat to object detector-based advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving systems. Augmenting the training images for object detectors is an efficient way to mitigate the threat from motion blur. However, little attention has been paid to the motion of the vehicle and the position of objects in the traffic scene, which limits the consistence between the resulting augmented images and traffic scenes. In this paper, we present a vehicle kinematics-based image augmentation algorithm by modeling and analyzing the traffic scenes to generate more realistic augmented images and achieve higher robustness improvement on object detectors against motion blur. Firstly, we propose a traffic scene model considering vehicle motion and the relationship between the vehicle and the object in the traffic scene.

Image corruptions due to noise, blur, contrast change, etc., could lead to a significant performance decline of Deep Neural Networks (DNN), which poses a potential threat to DNN-based autonomous vehicles. Previous works attempted to explain corruption from a Fourier perspective. By comparing the absolute Fourier spectrum difference between corrupted images and clean images in the RGB color space, they regard the noise from some corruptions (Gaussian noise, defocus blur, etc.) as concentrating on the high-frequency components while others (contrast, fog, etc.) concentrate on the low-frequency components. In this work, we present a new perspective that unifies corruptions as noise from high frequency and thus propose an image augmentation algorithm to achieve a more robust performance against common corruptions. First, we notice the 1/fα statistical rule of the natural image's spectrum and the channels-wise differential sensitivity on the YCbCr color space of the Human Visual System.

Aerodynamic noise transmits through automotive window, causing great adverse influence on comfortability and noise-vibration-harshness (NVH) performance. However, the complicated external turbulent air flow, as well as the internal metal-rubber nonlinear sealing constraint, makes the mechanism of aerodynamic noise generation and transmission very difficult. Regarding the complex exterior aerodynamics-induced load and nonlinear metal-rubber interaction and constraint, an efficient two-step numerical prediction method is presented in order to study the mechanism of its generation and transmission. The first step uses the commercial ANSYS-Fluent computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis based on the shear stress transport (SST) - turbulence kinetic energy (k) - the rate of dissipation of turbulence kinetic energy ε (epsilon) model and Lighthill’s noise source theory.

The camera-based advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) like lane departure warning system (LDWS) and lane keeping assist (LKA) can make vehicles safer and driving easier. Lane detection is indispensable for these lane-based systems for achieving vehicle local localization and behavior prediction. Since the vision is vulnerable to the variable environment conditions such as bad weather, occlusions and illumination, the robustness is important. In this paper, a robust algorithm for detecting and tracking multiple lanes with arbitrary shape is proposed. We extend the previously lane detection and tracking process from the space domain to the temporal-spatial domain by using a more robust and general multi-lane model. First, new slice images containing temporal information are generated from image sequences. Instead of binarization process, we use a more general detector for extracting the lane marker candidates with prior knowledge to generate the binary slice image.

In this paper, Digital Image Correlation Method (DICM) is employed to measure the shear mechanical property of the new style automotive structural adhesive specimens and traditional spot welded specimens under quasi static uniaxial shear tensile test. This experiment adopts a non-contact measuring method to measure the strain of specimens. A CCD and a computer image processing system are used to capture and record the real-time surface images of the specimens before and after deformation. Digital correlation software is used to process the imagines before and after deformation to obtain the specimen's strain of the moment. And then both the force-displacement curve and the stress-strain curve during the tensile process could be obtained. The test and analysis results show that the new style structural adhesive specimens have a great advantage with the spot welded specimens. It provides experimental evidence for further improvement of this structural adhesive.

The main challenge for future autonomous vehicles is to identify their location and body pose in real time during driving, that is, “where am I? and how will I go?”. We address the problems of pose estimation and scene perception from continuous visual frames in intelligent vehicle. Recent advanced technology in the domain of deep learning proposes to train some learning models for vehicle’s series detection tasks in a supervised or unsupervised manner, which has numerous advances over traditional approaches, mainly reflected in the absence of manual calibration and synchronization of the camera and IMU. In the paper, we propose a novel approach for pose estimation and scene recognition with a deep fusion of multi-modal neural features in the manner of unsupervised. Firstly, low-cost camera and IMU are used to extract original visual and inertial data, then the visual and inertial encoders are utilized to encoder the feature of the two modes.

In order to avoid the influence of the change of the camera pitch angle and the variation of the height of the ground on the ranging accuracy, improve the real-time performance of the algorithm by substituting the current widely-used monocular vision ranging algorithm which builds the optical model based on the shadow of the vehicle floor and the lane line, as well as avoid the classification of vehicle detection, a vehicle distance measurement algorithm based on monocular vision and license plate width is established. Firstly, the target image acquisition and preprocessing are studied. Then the paper studies the license plate image location segmentation method based on accelerated template matching. On this basis, the algorithm for obtaining the ratio of license plate width to image width is studied, and the function of vehicle distance and license plate ratio width is established.