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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.

Knowledge of the tire slip ratio can greatly improve vehicle longitudinal stability and its dynamic performance. Most conventional slip ratio observers were mainly designed based on input of non-driven wheel speed and estimated vehicle speed. However, they are not applicable for electric vehicles (EVs) with four in-wheel motors. Also conventional methods on speed estimation via integration of accelerometer signals can often lead to large offset by long-time integral calculation. Further, model uncertainties, including steady state error and unmodeled dynamics, are considered as additive disturbances, and may affect the stability of the system with estimated state error. This paper proposes a novel slip ratio observer based on input-to-state stability (ISS) method for electric vehicles with four-wheel independent driving motors.

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.

In this article, the regenerative braking system is designed, which can realize the torque allocation between electric braking and hydraulic braking, where the cost function designed in this article considers factors of braking torque following effect, energy regenerative power, and hydraulic braking consumed power. In addition, a complete anti-lock braking system (ABS) is designed, which is based on regenerative braking. With the optimal slip ratio as control target, target wheel speed, control wheel speed, braking torque control strategy, and enable/disenable control logic of ABS are determined. By MATLAB/Simulink-DYNA4 co-simulation and real vehicle test, the feasibility and applicability of ABS based on regenerative braking are verified, under the condition of small severity of braking.

As one of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), automatic parking system has great market prospect and application value. In this paper, based on an intelligent vehicle platform, an automatic parking system is designed by using multi-point preview theory. The vehicle kinematics model was established, based on Ackermann steering principle. By analyzing working conditions of parallel parking, complex constraint condition of parking trajectory is established and reference trajectory based on sine wave is proposed. In addition, combined with multi-point preview theory, the design of trajectory following controller for automatic parking is completed. The cost function is designed, which consider the trajectory following effect and the degree of easy handling. The optimization of trajectory following control is completed by using the cost function.

Due to growing interest in automated driving, the need for better understanding of human driving behavior in uncertain environment, such as driving behavior at un-signalized crossroad and roundabout, has further increased. Driving behavior at roundabout is greatly influenced by different dynamic factors such as speed, distance and circulating flow of the potentially conflicting vehicles, and drivers should choose whether to leave or wait at the upcoming exit according to these factors. In this paper, the influential dynamic factors and driving behavior characteristics at the roundabout is analyzed in detail, random forest method is then deployed to predict the driving behavior. For training the driving behavior model, four typical roundabout layouts were created under a real-time driving simulator with PanoSim-RT and dSPACE. Traffic participants with different motion style were also set in the simulation platform to mimic real driving conditions.

In recent years, intelligent vehicles have become one of the major research topics in vehicle engineering and have created a new opportunity for the automotive industry. Simulation and real experiment are both essential to the development of intelligent vehicle technologies. Vehicle positioning systems, such as global positioning system (GPS), play an important role in intelligent vehicle development. The GPS model plays a major part in the development of intelligent vehicle simulation systems. Primarily focusing on application requirements of intelligent vehicle simulation platforms for GPS sensor modeling, considering the major factors affecting positioning accuracy in vehicle driving environments, this article establishes a new GPS model and algorithm based on the physical and functional characteristics of GPS. As the basis of this model system, a precise ephemeris model is established to obtain the coordinates of GPS satellites at any given time.

This paper reports an effort to improve plan of vehicle trajectory using an approach with rapidly-exploring random trees (RRT), which has been widely adopted in the prior art for complex and dynamic traffic environment. Design and implement of an integrated threat assessment is presented that evaluates threats of the trajectory. A node and trajectory evaluation index was introduced into the proposed RRT algorithm to connect an appropriate node and select the best trajectory. The contribution of this paper is on the threat assessment that takes into account not only obstacle avoidance but also stability. The simulation is conducted and the results show that the proposed method works as expected and is valid and effective.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).