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This paper presented an engineering review on the state of the art in the research and development of vehicle-trailer handling dynamics and stability controls. The issues and potential technical solutions were identified in various areas and the unique characteristics of vehicle-trailer as a combined system were investigated and compared to a single-unit vehicle system. Many approaches taken in modeling, analysis, simulation and testing were examined, and various control methods, actuations and control implementations were evaluated. As a result of this study, further research areas were also identified. While it is important to maintain the stability of a trailer, thus the stability of a vehicle-trailer combination, it remains one of the major challenges in designing an appropriate control law to balance effectively the requirements between stability and handling performance, which often set conflicting objectives.

With rapid increase of vehicles on the road, safety concerns have become increasingly prominent. Since the leading cause of many traffic accidents is known to be by human drivers, developing autonomous vehicles is considered to be an effective approach to solve the problems above. Although trajectory tracking plays one of the most important roles on autonomous driving, handling the coupling between trajectory-tracking control and ESP under certain driving scenarios remains to be challenging. This paper focuses on trajectory-tracking control considering the role of ESP. A vehicle model is developed with two degrees of freedom, including vehicle lateral, and yaw motions. Based on the proposed model, the vehicle trajectory is separated into both longitudinal and lateral motion. The coupling effect of the vehicle and ESP is analyzed in the paper. The lateral trajectory-tracking algorithm is developed based on the preview follower theory.

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).

Steering torque feedback, or steering feel, is widely regarded as an important aspect of driver interface to road feel. To generate a steering feel with the appropriate level of fidelity required by a driver-vehicle system or a driving simulator, it is essential to gain a good understanding of various important influencing factors of steering torque feedback. This paper presents a comprehensive study and analysis of internal and external factors that strongly affect steering torque feedback. A steering torque feedback model with sufficient fidelity is established and verified as the base for this study. The individual- and collective-level influences of these factors on steering torque feedback are analyzed in both time domain and frequency domain, with guidelines provided on how to properly use these influencing factors to control their negative effects in modeling steering torque feedback.

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.

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.

When automobiles are at the threat of collisions, steering usually needs shorter longitudinal distance than braking for collision avoidance, especially under the condition of high speed or low adhesion. Thus, more collision accidents can be avoided in the same situation. The steering assistance is in need since the operation is hard for drivers. And considering the dynamic characteristics of vehicles in those maneuvers, the real-time and the accuracy of the assisted algorithms is essential. In view of the above problems, this paper first takes lateral acceleration of the vehicle as the constraint, aiming at the collision avoidance situation of the straight lane and the stable driving inside the curve, and trajectory of the collision avoidance is derived by a quintic polynomial.

The ability to recognize traffic vehicles’ lane change maneuver lays the foundation for predicting their long-term trajectories in real-time, which is a key component for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and autonomous automobiles. Learning-based approach is powerful and efficient, such approach has been used to solve maneuver recognition problems of the ego vehicles on conventional researches. However, since the parameters and driving states of the traffic vehicles are hardly observed by exteroceptive sensors, the performance of traditional methods cannot be guaranteed. In this paper, a novel approach using multi-class probability estimates and Bayesian inference model is proposed for traffic vehicle lane change maneuver recognition. The multi-class recognition problem is first decomposed into three binary problems under error correcting output codes (ECOC) framework.

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.

Based on the research and analysis of the current brake systems, this paper presents a novel electro-hydraulic brake system, which can better meet the functional requirements. The system mainly contains a master cylinder, two brake hydraulic cylinders and drive motors, two transmission mechanisms, thirteen solenoid valves, pedal force simulator, etc. Since the proposed brake system uses a dual motor along with two brake hydraulic cylinders, it has advantages in providing fast pressure response, flexible working modes, high precision and strong fault tolerance. In order to facilitate the study of pressure control algorithm for the proposed brake system, a mathematical model of the brake system is firstly established, then a multiplexed time-division pressure control algorithm is proposed to realize the simultaneous or partially simultaneous pressure control, which ensures the high precision and short response time.

A vehicle dynamics stability control system based on integrated-electro-hydraulic brake (I-EHB) system with hierarchical control architecture and nonlinear control method is designed to improve the vehicle dynamics stability under extreme conditions in this paper. The I-EHB system is a novel brake-by-wire system, and is suitable to the development demands of intelligent vehicle technology and new energy vehicle technology. Four inlet valves and four outlet valves are added to the layout of a conventional four-channel hydraulic control unit. A permanent-magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) provides a stabilized high-pressure source in the master cylinder, and the four-channel hydraulic control unit ensures that the pressures in each wheel cylinder can be modulated separately at a high precision. Besides, the functions of Anti-lock Braking System, Traction Control System and Regenerative Braking System, Autonomous Emergency Braking can be integrated in this brake-by-wire system.

This paper proposes a Real-Time Estimation of Radar Cross Section for ADAS Simulation, aimed to enable math-based virtual development and test of ADAS. The electromagnetic scattering mechanism is firstly analyzed with targets to be typical objects in traffic. Then a geometric model is developed, in which the object surfaces are divided into multiple scattering zones corresponding to different scattering mechanism. According to different surface curvature radius and scattering mechanism, the scattering zones are approximately equivalent to plane, cylinder, sphere and so on. Using the ARD model based on an improved physical optics and diffraction theory, RCS value of a zone is estimated. Then the RCS of the object surface is obtained by vector superposition of all zones. Some typical simulation comparisons are carried out, which proves the practicability of our method.

The limitation of drivers' attention and perception may bring collision dangers, Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) can help drivers to avoid the potential collisions through active braking. Since the positive effect of it, motor corporations have begun to equip their vehicles with the system, and regulatory agencies in various countries have introduced test standards. At this stage, the actuator of AEB usually adopts Electronic Stability Program (ESP), but it poor performance of continuous working period and active pressure built-up for all wheels limits its implements. Electromechanical brake booster can realize power assisted brake without relying on the vacuum source and a variety of specific power curves. Moreover it can achieve the active braking with a rapid response, which make it can fulfill requirements of automotive electric and intelligent development.

Power management of a hybrid energy storage system (HESS) with battery and supercapacitor(SC) is of critical importance for electric vehicles to achieve good driving performance, long traveling range and high energy efficiency. Due to the great differences in dynamic characteristics between battery and supercapacitor, and the complexity of a HESS, proper power management strategy between battery and supercapacitor remains to be challenging. The proposed research in this paper is to develop a power-balance and wavelet-transform based strategy for power distribution in a way such that each device can be utilized optimally. The transient dynamics is first decoupled via wavelet-transform algorithm while the power-balance algorithm is employed to improve system robustness based on the desired velocity-SOC relationship and a fuzzy logical controller. Finally some simulations have been conducted with results shown that the proposed strategy is valid and effective.

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.

Environmental sensing and perception is one of the key technologies on intelligent driving or autonomous vehicles. As a complementary part to current radar and lidar sensors, ultrasonic sensor has become more and more popular due to its high value to the cost. Different from other sensors mainly based on propagation of electromagnetic wave, ultrasonic sensor possesses some unique features and physical characteristics that bring many merits to autonomous vehicle research, like transparent obstacles and highly reflective surfaces detection. Its low-cost property can further bring down hardware cost to foster widespread use of intelligent driving or autonomous vehicles. To accelerate the development of autonomous vehicle, this paper proposes a high fidelity ultrasonic sensor model based on its physical characteristics, including obstacle detection, distance measurement and signal attenuation.

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.

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.

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.

Intelligent vehicles have gained increasing popularity in recent years as traffic safety and efficiency have become the major challenges faced by automotive industry. Vehicle positioning system, such as GPS, plays more and more important role on intelligent or autonomous driving. Intelligent vehicle technologies have been developed and tested mainly based on intensive field experiment under various driving scenarios. However, the large variation, uncertainty and complexity of the driving environment, including buildings, traffic and weather conditions have posed great challenges on test repeatability and system robustness. This paper proposes a GPS model considering software-centered observation errors. The focus of the research is on its error to reflect the real signals from GPS measurement.