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Accurate and robust knowledge of battery internal states and parameters is a prerequisite for the safe, efficient, and reliable operation of electric flying cars. Battery states such as state of charge (SOC), state of temperature (SOT), and state of power (SOP) are of particular interest for urban air mobility (UAM) applications. This article proposes a new safety-oriented multi-state estimation framework for collaboratively updating the SOC, SOT, and SOP of lithium-ion batteries under typical UAM mission profiles that explicitly incorporates the underlying interplay among these three states. Specifically, the SOC estimation is performed by combining an adaptive extended Kalman filter with a timely calibrated battery electrical model, and the key temperature information, including the volume-averaged temperature, highest temperature, and maximum temperature difference, is estimated using an adaptive Kalman filter based on a simplified 2-D spatially-resolved thermal model.

Driving safety is an eternal theme of the transportation industry. In recent years, with the rapid growth of car ownership, traffic accidents have become more frequent, and the harm it brings to human society has become increasingly serious. In this context, car safety assisted driving technology has received widespread attention. As an effective means to reduce traffic accidents and reduce accident losses, it has become the research frontier in the field of traffic engineering and represents the trend of future vehicle development. However, there are still many technical problems that need to be solved. With the continuous development of computer vision technology, face detection technology has become more and more mature, and applications have become more and more extensive. This article will use the face detection technology to detect the driver's face, and then analyze the changes in driver's driving focus.

This paper proposes a low-cost but indirect method for occupancy detection and occupant counting purpose in current and future automotive systems. It can serve as either a way to determine the number of occupants riding inside a car or a way to complement the other devices in determining the occupancy. The proposed method is useful for various mobility applications including car rental, fleet management, taxi, car sharing, occupancy in autonomous vehicles, etc. It utilizes existing on-board motion sensor measurements, such as those used in the vehicle stability control function, together with door open and closed status. The vehicle’s motion signature in response to an occupant’s boarding and alighting is first extracted from the motion sensors that measure the responses of the vehicle body. Then the weights of the occupants are estimated by fitting the vehicle responses with a transient vehicle dynamics model.

In automobile industry, computational models built to predict the performances of the prototype vehicles are on the rise. To assess the validity or predictive capability of the model for its intended usage, validation activities are conducted to compare computational model outputs with test measurements. Validation becomes difficult when dealing with dynamic systems which often involve multiple functional responses, and the complex characteristics need to be appropriately considered. Many promising data analysis tools and metrics were previously developed to handle data correlation and evaluate the errors in magnitude, phase shift, and shape. However, these methods show their limitations when dealing with nonlinear multivariate dynamic systems. In this paper, kernel function based projection is employed to transform the nonlinear data into linear space, followed by the regular principal component analysis (PCA) based data processing.

Simulation models based design has become the common practice in automotive product development. Before applying these models in practice, model validation needs to be conducted to assess the validity of the models by comparing model predictions with experimental observations. In the validation process, it is vital to develop appropriate validation metrics for intended applications. When dealing with multivariate systems, comparisons between model predictions and test data with multiple responses would lead to conflicting decisions. To address this issue, this paper proposed a Bayesian classifier based validation method. With the consideration of both error rate and confidence in hypothesis testing, Bayesian classifier is developed for decision making. The process of validation is implemented on a real-world vehicle design case. The results show the proposed method’s potential in practical application.

Noise-vibration-harshness (NVH) design optimization problems have become major concerns in the vehicle product development process. The Body-in-White (BIW) plays an important role in determining the dynamic characteristics of vehicle system during the concept design phase. Finite Element (FE) models are commonly used for vehicle design. However, even though the speed of computers has been increased a lot, the simulation of FE models is still too time-consuming due to the increase in model complexity. For complex systems, like vehicle body structures, the numerous design variables and constraints make the FE simulations based optimization design inefficient. This calls for the development of a systematic and efficient approach that can effectively perform optimization to further improve the NVH performance, while satisfying the stringent design constraints.

Previous study suggested that female, thin, obese, and older occupants had a higher risk of death and serious injury in motor vehicle crashes. Human body finite element models were a valuable tool in the study of injury biomechanics. The mesh deformation method based on radial basis function(RBF) was an attractive alternative for morphing baseline model to target models. Generally, when a complex model contained many elements and nodes, it was impossible to use all surface nodes as landmarks in RBF interpolation process, due to its prohibitive computational cost. To improve the efficiency, the current technique was to averagely select a set of nodes as landmarks from all surface nodes. In fact, the location and the number of selected landmarks had an important effect on the accuracy of mesh deformation. Hence, how to select important nodes as landmarks was a significant issue. In the paper, an efficient peak point-selection RBF mesh deformation method was used to select landmarks.

Simulation based design optimization has become the common practice in automotive product development. Increasing computer models are developed to simulate various dynamic systems. Before applying these models for product development, model validation needs to be conducted to assess their validity. In model validation, for the purpose of obtaining results successfully, it is vital to select or develop appropriate metrics for specific applications. For dynamic systems, one of the key obstacles of model validation is that most of the responses are functional, such as time history curves. This calls for the development of a metric that can evaluate the differences in terms of phase shift, magnitude and shape, which requires information from both time and frequency domain. And by representing time histories in frequency domain, more intuitive information can be obtained, such as magnitude-frequency and phase-frequency characteristics.