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Connected and automated vehicle (CAV) technologies promise a substantial decrease in traffic accidents and traffic jams, and bring new opportunities for improving vehicle’s fuel economy. However, testing autonomous vehicles in a real world traffic environment is costly, and covering all corner cases is nearly impossible. Furthermore, it is very challenging to create a controlled real traffic environment that vehicle tests can be conducted repeatedly and compared fairly. With the capability of allowing testing more scenarios than those that would be possible with real world testing, simulations are deemed safer, more efficient, and more cost-effective. In this work, a full-scale simulation platform was developed to simulate the infrastructure, traffic, vehicle, powertrain, and their interactions. It is used as an effective tool to facilitate control algorithm development for improving CAV’s fuel economy in real world driving scenarios.

This paper presents recent advances in automotive microprocessor, operating system, and supporting software technology that supports regulatory and/or functional safety graphics within vehicle cockpit displays. These graphics include “virtual switches” that replace physical switches in the vehicle, as well as “virtual indicators” that replace physical indicator lights. We discuss the functional safety design process and impacts to software and hardware architecture as well as the software design methods to implement End-To-End [E2E] network protection between different ECUs and software processes. We also describe hardware monitoring requirements within the display panel, backlighting, and touch screen and examine an example system design to illustrate the concepts.

In this paper, a computer model of a multi-purpose vehicle (MPV) is built to study vehicle ride comfort by multi-body system dynamic theory. Virtual test rigs are developed to perform natural body frequency tests and random road input tests on the complete vehicle multi-body dynamic model. By comparing simulation results with field test results, the accuracy of the model is validated and the feasibility of virtual test rigs is established.

Vehicle Longitudinal Control (VLC) algorithm is the basis function of automotive Cruise Control system. The main task of VLC is to achieve a longitudinal acceleration tracking controller, performance requirements of which include fast response and high tracking accuracy. At present, many control methods are used to implement vehicle longitudinal control. However, the existing methods are need to be improved because these methods need a high accurate vehicle dynamic model or a number of experiments to calibrate the parameters of controller, which are time consuming and costly. To overcome the difficulties of controller parameters calibration and accurate vehicle dynamic modeling, a vehicle longitudinal control algorithm based on iterative learning control (ILC) is proposed in this paper. The algorithm works based on the information of input and output of the system, so the method does not require a vehicle dynamics model.

Disc brakes operate with very close proximity of the brake pads and the brake rotor, with as little as a tenth of a millimeter of movement of the pads required to bring them into full contact with the rotor to generate braking torque. It is usual for a disc brake to operate with some amount of residual drag in the fully released state, signifying constant contact between the pads and the rotor. With this contact, every miniscule movement of the rotor pushes against the brake pads and changes the forces between them. Sustained loads on the brake corner, and maneuvers such as cornering, can both produce rotor movement relative to the caliper, which can push it steadily against one or both of the brake pads. This can greatly increase the residual force in the caliper, and increase drag. This dependence of drag behavior on the movement of the brake rotor creates some vehicle-dependent behavior.

This paper summarizes the validation of prototype vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) safety applications based on Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) in the United States under a cooperative agreement between the Crash Avoidance Metrics Partners LLC (CAMP) and the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). After consideration of a number of V2I safety applications, Red Light Violation Warning (RLVW), Curve Speed Warning (CSW) and Reduced Speed Zone Warning with Lane Closure Warning (RSZW/LC) were developed, validated and demonstrated using seven different vehicles (six passenger vehicles and one Class 8 truck) leveraging DSRC-based messages from a Road Side Unit (RSU). The developed V2I safety applications were validated for more than 20 distinct scenarios and over 100 test runs using both light- and heavy-duty vehicles over a period of seven months. Subsequently, additional on-road testing of CSW on public roads and RSZW/LC in live work zones were conducted in Southeast Michigan.

The engine operating point (EOP), which is determined by the engine speed and torque, is an important part of a vehicle's powertrain performance and it impacts FC, available propulsion power, and emissions. Predicting instantaneous EOP in real-time subject to dynamic driver behaviour and environmental conditions is a challenging problem, and in existing literature, engine performance is predicted based on internal powertrain parameters. However, a driver cannot directly influence these internal parameters in real-time and can only accommodate changes in driving behaviour and cabin temperature. It would be beneficial to develop a direct relationship between the vehicle-level parameters that a driver could influence in real-time, and the instantaneous EOP. Such a relationship can be exploited to dynamically optimize engine performance.

It aims to study the unsteady flow characteristic of the side-view mirror wake field, and reduce the wind noise by means of unsteady flow control. In this paper, the PIV test in a wind tunnel is used to capture the unsteady flow in the wake field of the side-view mirror, which is used to verify the accuracy of the steady simulation method with RANS after being averaged. Then LES turbulence model is used to obtain the wind noise, and the unsteady flow characteristic like vortex shedding of the side-view mirror is studied. The results show that, in the wake of the side-view mirror, there is a vortex pair similar to Karman Vortex Street. In both horizontal and vertical sections, these two vortexes are respectively separated from the upper and lower edges of the side-view mirror. Accompanied by a significantly uncertain periodic shedding, they continue to extend back until dissipating.

In the context of vehicle electrification, improving vehicle aerodynamics is not only critical for efficiency and range, but also for driving experience. In order to balance the necessary trade-offs between drag and downforce without significant impact on the vehicle styling, we see an increasing amount of active aerodynamic solutions on high-end passenger vehicles. Active rear spoilers are one of the most common active aerodynamic features. They deploy at high vehicle speed when additional downforce is required [1, 2]. For a vehicle with an active rear spoiler, the aerodynamic performance is typically predicted through simulations or physical testing at different static spoiler positions. These positions range from fully stowed to fully deployed. However, this approach does not provide any information regarding the transient effects during the deployment of the rear spoiler, which can be critical to understanding key performance aspects of the system.

Simulation has been considered as one of the key enablers on the development and testing for autonomous driving systems as in-vehicle and field testing can be very time-consuming, costly and often impossible due to safety concerns. Accurately modeling traffic, therefore, is critically important for autonomous driving simulation on threat assessment, trajectory planning, etc. Traditionally when modeling traffic, the motion of traffic vehicles is often considered to be deterministic and modeled based on its governing physics. However, the sensed or perceived motion of traffic vehicles can be full of errors or inaccuracy due to the inaccurate and/or incomplete sensing information. In addition, it is naturally true that any future trajectories are unknown. This paper proposes a novel modeling method on traffic considering its motion uncertainties, based on Gaussian process (GP).

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.

The automotive industry is continuously striving to reduce vehicle mass by reducing the mass of components including wheel bearings. A typical wheel bearing assembly is mostly steel, including both the wheel and knuckle mounting flanges. Mass optimization of the wheel hub has traditionally been accomplished by reducing the cross-sectional thickness of these components. Recently bearing suppliers have also investigated the use of alternative materials. While bearing component performance is verified through analysis and testing by the supplier, additional effects from system integration and performance over time also need to be comprehended. In a recent new vehicle architecture, the wheel bearing hub flange was reduced to optimize it for low mass. In addition, holes were added for further mass reduction. The design met all the supplier and OEM component level specifications.

Fabric materials have diverse applications in the automotive industry which include upholstery, carpeting, safety devices, and interior trim components. The textile industry has invested substantial effort toward development of standard testing techniques for characterizing mechanical properties of different fabric types (e.g. woven and knitted). However, there are presently no standards for determination of Young's modulus, Poisson's ratio and tensile stress-strain properties required for the detailed modeling of fabric materials in vehicle structural simulations. This paper presents results from uniaxial tensile tests of different automotive seat cover fabric materials. Digital image correlation, a full field optical method for measuring surface deformation, was used to determine tensile properties in both the warp/wale and the weft/course directions. The fabrics were tested with and without the foam backing.

In China there is a strong trend in the application of vehicles equipped with automatic transmissions in considering the complexity of traffic and the convenience of automatic transmissions. As a type of automatic transmission, automated mechanical transmission (AMT) shows great potential to be developed as a main transmission because of its simple structures, easy upgrade from manual transmission (MT) and low price. Support Vector Machine (SVM) is a new statistic method which could make a good prediction with limited training instances. Compared with Artificial Neutral Network (ANN), SVM can provide better genetic ability. In order to verify the ability of the new method, the model trained by one set of AMT car data was applied on some other AMT vehicles, and the predicted results were compared with subjective rating results by expert drivers and analyzed to identify the potential of this new assessment system.

At the collision moment, a driver’s lower extremity will be in different foot position, which leads to the different posture of the lower extremity with various muscle activations. These will affect the driver’s injury during collision, so it is necessary to investigate further. A simulated collision scene was constructed, and 20 participants (10 male and 10 female) were recruited for the test in a driving simulator. The braking posture and muscle activation of eight major muscles of driver’s lower extremity (both legs) were measured. The muscle activations in different postures were then analyzed. At the collision moment, the right leg was possible to be on the brake (male, 40%; female, 45%), in the air (male, 27.5%; female, 37.5%) or even on the accelerator (male, 25%; female, 12.5%). The left leg was on the floor all along.

Although advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) have been widely introduced in automotive industry to enhance driving safety and comfort, and to reduce drivers’ driving burden, they do not in general reflect different drivers’ driving styles or customized with individual personalities. This can be important to comfort and enjoyable driving experience, and to improved market acceptance. However, it is challenging to understand and further identify drivers’ driving styles due to large number and great variations of driving population. Previous research has mainly adopted physical approaches in modeling drivers’ driving behavior, which however are often very much limited, if not impossible, in capturing human drivers’ driving characteristics. This paper proposes a reinforcement learning based approach, in which the driving styles are formulated through drivers’ learning processes from interaction with surrounding environment.

In the field of autonomous driving trajectory planning, it’s virtual to ensure real-time planning while guaranteeing feasibility and robustness. Current widely adopted approaches include decoupling path planning and velocity planning based on optimization method, which can’t always yield optimal solutions, especially in complex dynamic scenarios. Furthermore, search-based and sampling-based solutions encounter limitations due to their low resolution and high computational costs. This paper presents a novel spatio-temporal trajectory planning approach that integrates both search-based planning and optimization-based planning method. This approach retains the advantages of search-based method, allowing for the identification of a global optimal solution through search. To address the challenge posed by the non-convex nature of the original solution space, we introduce a spatio-temporal semantic corridor structure, which constructs a convex feasible set for the problem.

Under complex and extreme operating conditions, the road adhesion coefficient emerges as a critical state parameter for tire force analysis and vehicle dynamics control. In contrast to model-based estimation methods, intelligent tire technology enables the real-time feedback of tire-road interaction information to the vehicle control system. This paper proposes an approach that integrates intelligent tire systems with machine learning to acquire precise road adhesion coefficients for vehicles. Firstly, taking into account the driving conditions, sensor selection is conducted to develop an intelligent tire hardware acquisition system based on MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems) three-axis acceleration sensors, utilizing a simplified hardware structure and wireless transmission mode. Secondly, through the collection of real vehicle experiment data on different road surfaces, a dataset is gathered for machine learning training.

Most of the Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) applications are aiming at improving both driving safety and comfort. Understanding human drivers' driving styles that make the systems more human-like or personalized for ADAS is the key to improve the system performance, in particular, the acceptance and adaption of ADAS to human drivers. The research presented in this paper focuses on the classification and identification for personalized driving styles. To motivate and reflect the information of different driving styles at the most extent, two sets, which consist of six kinds of stimuli with stochastic disturbance for the leading vehicles are created on a real-time Driver-In-the-Loop Intelligent Simulation Platform (DILISP) with PanoSim-RT®, dSPACE® and DEWETRON® and field test with both RT3000 family and RT-Range respectively.

With the rapid development of modern economy and society, traffic congestion has become an increasingly serious problem. Vehicle cooperative driving can alleviate traffic congestion and improve road traffic capacity. Compare with vehicle separate control, cooperative driving combines various vehicle systems, and highly integrates information on obstacle location, vehicle status and driving intention. Then the controller uniformly issues instructions to ensure the orderly driving of the platoon. In the cooperative driving platoon, the displacement difference and the speed difference between vehicles have a certain relationship, which reduces the possibility of traffic accidents and then improves the safety of driving. In the process of cooperative driving, if there are multiple vehicles whose speeds don’t meet the current lane requirements, or if there are obstacles ahead, multi-vehicle lane change measures must be taken.