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Performance testing and evaluation always plays an important role in the developmental process of a vehicle, which also applies to autonomous vehicles. The complex nature of an autonomous vehicle from architecture to functionality demands even more quality-and-quantity controlled testing and evaluation than ever before. Most of the existing testing methodologies are task-or-scenario based and can only support single or partial functional testing. These approaches may be helpful at the initial stage of autonomous vehicle development. However, as the integrated autonomous system gets mature, these approaches fall short of supporting comprehensive performance evaluation. This paper proposes a novel hierarchical and systematic testing and evaluation approach to bridge the above-mentioned gap.

Research of Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) is an important issue of intelligent vehicle (IV). As we all known, a real and experienced driver can control vehicle's speed very well under every traffic environment of ACC working. So a direct and feasible way for establishing ACC controller is to build a human-like longitudinal control algorithm with the simulation of driver behavior of speed control. In this paper, a novel fuzzy self-tuning control algorithm of ACC is established and this controller's parameters can be tuned on-line based on the evaluation indexes that can describe how the driver consider the quality of dynamical characteristic of vehicle longitudinal dynamics. With the advantage of the controller's parameter on-line self-tuning, the computational workload from matching design of ACC controller is also efficiently reduced.

Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) are being developed for more and more complicated application scenarios, which often require more predictive strategies with better understanding of driving environment. Taking traffic vehicles’ maneuvers into account can greatly expand the beforehand time span for danger awareness. This paper presents a maneuver-based strategy to vehicle collision threat assessment. First, a maneuver-based trajectory prediction model (MTPM) is built, in which near-future trajectories of ego vehicle and traffic vehicles are estimated with the combination of vehicle’s maneuvers and kinematic models that correspond to every maneuver. The most probable maneuvers of ego vehicle and each traffic vehicles are modeled and inferred via Hidden Markov Models with mixture of Gaussians outputs (GMHMM). Based on the inferred maneuvers, trajectory sets consisting of vehicles’ position and motion states are predicted by kinematic models.

An autonomous vehicle is a comprehensive intelligent system that includes environment sensing, vehicle localization, path planning and decision-making control, of which environment sensing technology is a prerequisite for realizing autonomous driving. In the early days, vehicles sensed the surrounding environment through sensors such as cameras, radar, and lidar. With the development of 5G technology and the Vehicle-to-everything (V2X), other information from the roadside can also be received by vehicles. Such as traffic jam ahead, construction road occupation, school area, current traffic density, crowd density, etc. Such information can help the autonomous driving system understand the current driving environment more clearly. Vehicles are no longer limited to areas that can be sensed by sensors. Vehicles with different autonomous driving levels have different adaptability to the environment.

A multitude of recent studies are suggestive of the EV as a paramount representative of the NEV, its development direction is transformed from “individuals adapt to vehicles” to “vehicles serve for occupants”. The multi-mode drive control technology is relatively mature in traditional auto control sphere, however, a host of EV continues to use a single control strategy, which lacks of flexibility and diversity, little if nothing interprets the vehicle performances. Furthermore, due to the complex road environment and peculiarity of vehicle occupants that different requirement has been made for vehicle performance. To solve above problems, this paper uses the key technology of mathematical statistics process in MATLAB, such as the mean, linear fitting and discrete algorithms to clean up, screening and classification the original data in general rules, and based on short trips in the segments of kinematics analysis method to establish a representative of quintessential driving cycle.

Effectively detecting road boundaries in real time is critical to the applications of autonomous vehicles, such as vehicle localization, path planning and environmental understanding. To precisely extract the road boundaries from the 3D-LiDAR data, a dedicated algorithm consisting of four steps is proposed in this paper. The steps are as follows: Firstly, the 3D-LiDAR data is pre-processed by employing the RANSAC method, the ground points are quickly separated from the original 3D-LiDAR point cloud to reduce the disturbance from the obstacles on the road, this greatly decreases the size of the point cloud to be processed. Secondly, based on the principle of 3D-LiDAR scanning, the ground points are divided into scan layers. And the road boundary points of each scan layer are detected by using three spatial features based on sliding window.

Velocity prediction on hilly road can be applied to the energy-saving predictive control of intelligent vehicles. However, the existing methods do not deeply analyze the difference and diversity of road slope driving characteristics, which affects prediction performance of some prediction method. To further improve the prediction performance on road slope, and different road slope driving features are fully exploited and integrated with the common prediction method. A rolling prediction-based multi-scale fusion prediction considering road slope transition driving characteristics is proposed in this study. Amounts of driving data in hilly sections were collected by the advanced technology and equipment. The Markov chain model was used to construct the velocity and acceleration joint state transition characteristics under each road slope transition pair, which expresses the obvious driving difference characteristics when the road slope changes.

One of the key technologies of automotive active safety systems is to calculate the wheel speed and wheel angular acceleration or deceleration. Obtaining an accurate control quantity is the prerequisite for active safety systems no matter what control logics are used to realize the control function. This paper puts forward a new wheel speed processing algorithm. This method was simulated in MATLAB \ Simulink. Then it was tested in a certain type of vehicle of FAW by applying dSPACE RCP. It proves that this algorithm assures the precision at high and low speed and the real-time performance at low speed.

Autonomous driving technology is more and more important nowadays, it has been changing the living style of our society. As for autonomous driving planning and control, vehicle dynamics has strong nonlinearity and uncertainty, so vehicle dynamics and control is one of the most challenging parts. At present, many kinds of specific vehicle dynamics models have been proposed, this review attempts to give an overview of the state of the art of vehicle dynamics models for autonomous driving. Firstly, this review starts from the simple geometric model, vehicle kinematics model, dynamic bicycle model, double-track vehicle model and multi degree of freedom (DOF) dynamics model, and discusses the specific use of these classical models for autonomous driving state estimation, trajectory prediction, motion planning, motion control and so on.

The brake-by-wire system (BBW) is better match the new energy vehicle in the future direction of development. The electro-mechanical brake (EMB) is lack of the brake failure backup and need a high 42 V voltage for the power supply. This paper presents a new brake-by-wire hybrid brake system (HBS) with the electro-hydraulic brake (EHB) equipped on the front wheels and the EMB equipped on the rear wheels. The combination of these two brake-by-wire systems has advantages of both the EHB and EMB system. The EMB on the rear wheels totally removing the rear pipes and can be simply mounted. In addition, since the need of brake torque on the rear axle is relatively small, the power supply of EMB can be reduced to 12 V. Meanwhile, the EHB on the front wheels has the failure backup function through the hydraulic line. The HBS can quickly and accurately regulate four wheels brake force of vehicles which can well meet the requirement of antilock brake system (ABS).

The Electronic Stability Program (ESP), as a key actuator of traditional automobile braking system, plays an important role in the development of intelligent vehicles by accurately controlling the pressure of wheels. However, the ESP is a highly nonlinear controlled object due to the changing of the working temperature, humidity, and hydraulic load. In this paper, an accurate pressure control strategy of single wheel during active braking of ESP is proposed, which doesn’t rely on the specific parameters of the hydraulic system and ESP. First, the structure and working principle of ESP have been introduced. Then, we discuss the possibility of Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) control based on the mathematical model of the high-speed switching valve. Subsequently, the pressure building characteristics of the inlet and outlet valves are analyzed by the hardware in the Loop (HiL) experimental platform.

Vehicle lane keeping system is becoming a new research focus of drive assistant system except adaptive cruise control system. As we all known, vehicle lateral dynamics show strong nonlinear and time-varying with the variety of longitudinal velocity, especially tire’s mechanics characteristic will change from linear characteristic under low speed to strong nonlinear under high speed. For this reason, the traditional PID controller and even self-tuning PID controller, which need to know a precise vehicle lateral dynamics model to adjust the control parameter, are too difficult to get enough accuracy and the ideal control quality. Based on neural network’s ability of self-learning, adaptive and approximate to any nonlinear function, an adaptive PID control algorithm with BP neural network self-tuning online was proposed for vehicle lane keeping.

The vehicle pull problem is very important to driving safety. Major factors that may cause the pull problem related to tire include variations of geometric dimension (e.g. RPK) and stiffness (e.g. cornering stiffness, aligning stiffness), plysteer and conicity. In previous research, the influencing mechanism of these factors was well studied. But in fact, vehicle pull problem caused by tire is probabilistic. When we assemble four tires onto the car, there could be 384 different assembly arrangements. If there are significant differences among these four tires, there will also be significant differences in the influence of different tire assembly schemes on vehicle pull, which has not been systematically discussed in previous studies. If we want to evaluate the pull performance of all these arrangements by vehicle test, it will be a time consuming process which will take almost 24 working days, along with a high test expense.

Intelligent driving, aimed for collision avoidance and self-navigation, is mainly based on environmental sensing via radar, lidar and/or camera. While each of the sensors has its own unique pros and cons, camera is especially good at object detection, recognition and tracking. However, unpredictable environmental illumination can potentially cause misdetection or false detection. To investigate the influence of illumination conditions on detection algorithms, we reproduced various illumination intensities in a photo-realistic virtual world, which leverages recent progress in computer graphics, and verified vehicle detection effect there. In the virtual world, the environmental illumination is controlled precisely from low to high to simulate different illumination conditions in the driving scenarios (with relative luminous intensity from 0.01 to 400). Sedan cars with different colors are modelled in the virtual world and used for detection task.

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.

To improve traditional heavy commercial vehicles performance, this paper introduces a novel hydraulic hub-motor auxiliary system, which could achieve auxiliary driving and auxiliary braking function. Firstly, the system configuration and operation modes are described. In order to achieve coordinating control and distribution of the engine power between mechanical and hydraulic paths, the paper proposes an optimal algorithm based on enhance of vehicle slip efficiency and the results show that displacement of hydraulic variable pump relates with the transmission gear ratio. And then the hydraulic pump displacement controller is designed, in which the feedforward and feedback strategy is adopted. Considering the characteristics of hydraulic hub-motor auxiliary system, a layered auxiliary drive control strategy is proposed in the paper, which includes signal layers, core control layers and executive layers.

A program of integrated electro-hydraulic braking system is proposed, and its structural composition and working principle are analyzed. According to the structural and mechanical characteristics of all key components, through some reasonable assumptions and simplifications, a motor, a brake master cylinder, four brake wheel cylinders, solenoid valves and an ESP (Electronic Stability Program) algorithm model is set up and simulations of typical braking conditions are carried out based on the Matlab/Simulink. Finally, after the assembly of each sub-model is complete and combining a vehicle which is set up in CarSim software environment, simulation tests and comprehensive performance analysis of the active safety stability control for a vehicle in double lane change and single lane change situations are carried out respectively. According to the dynamic characteristic curves of system, the effects of different structural and control parameters on braking performance are analyzed.

In order to study the influence of body flexibility on the truck ride comfort, a 4 DOF half vibration model of truck based on the motion synthesis between rigid body and body flexibility is established using elastic beam theory of equal section with both free ends. At the same time, a corresponding 2 DOF rigid vibration model is also built. The frequency response functions of system and response variables of two models are derived based on front wheel. The power spectral densities and the root mean square values of body acceleration, dynamic deflections and relative dynamic loads are obtained. By comparing the simulation results of rigid-elastic model and rigid model, it shows that body flexibility has a great impact on truck ride comfort and it cannot be ignored.

Since steering wheel torque feedback is one of the crucial factors for drivers to gain road feel and ensure driving safety, it is especially important to simulate the steering torque feedback for a driving simulator. At present, steering wheel feedback torque is mainly simulated by an electric motor with gear transmission. The torque response is typically slow, which can result in drivers’ discomfort and poor driving maneuverability. This paper presents a novel torque feedback device with magnetorheological (MR) fluid and coil spring. A phase separation control method is also proposed to control its feedback torque, including spring and damping torques respectively. The spring torque is generated by coil spring, the angle of coil spring can be adjusted by controlling a brushless DC motor. The damping torque is generated by MR fluid, the damping coefficient of MR fluid can be adjusted by controlling the current of excitation coil.

The new control algorithm for parallel hybrid electric vehicle is presented systematically, in which engine operation points are limited within higher efficient area by the control algorithm and the state of charge (SOC) is limited in a range in order to enhance the batteries' charging and discharging efficiency. In order to determine the ideal operating point of the vehicle's engine, the control strategy uses a lookup table to determine the torque output of the engine. The off-line simulation model of parallel HEV power train is developed which includes the control system and controlled objective (such as engine, electric motor, battery pack and so on). The results show that the control algorithm can effectively limite engine and battery operation points and much more fuel economy can be achieved than that of conventional one.