Search Results

The research and development of data-driven highly automated driving system components such as trajectory prediction, motion planning, driving test scenario generation, and safety validation all require large amounts of naturalistic vehicle trajectory data. Therefore, a variety of data collection methods have emerged to meet the growing demand. Among these, camera-equipped drones are gaining more and more attention because of their obvious advantages. Specifically, compared to others, drones have a wider field of bird's eye view, which is less likely to be blocked, and they could collect more complete and natural vehicle trajectory data. Besides, they are not easily observed by traffic participants and ensure that the human driver behavior data collected is realistic and natural. In this paper, we present a complete vehicle trajectory data extraction framework based on aerial videos. It consists of three parts: 1) objects detection, 2) data association, and 3) data cleaning.

Recently, several datasets have become available for occupant monitoring algorithm development, including real and synthetic datasets. However, real data acquisition is expensive and labeling is complex, while virtual data may not accurately reflect actual human physiology. To address these issues and obtain high-fidelity data for training intelligent driving monitoring systems, we have constructed a hybrid dataset that combines real driving image data with corresponding virtual data generated from 3D driving scenarios. We have also taken into account individual anthropometric measures and driving postures. Our approach not only greatly enriches the dataset by using virtual data to augment the sample size, but it also saves the need for extensive annotation efforts. Besides, we can enhance the authenticity of the virtual data by applying ergonomics techniques based on RAMSIS, which is crucial in dataset construction.

As one of the key technologies in autonomous driving, the lateral planning module guides the lateral movement during the driving process. An integrated lateral planning module should consider the non-holonomic constraints of a vehicle, the optimization of the generated trajectory and the applicability to various scenarios. However, the current lateral planning methods can only meet parts of these requirements. In order to satisfy all the performance requirements above, a novel Potential Field (PF) based lateral planning method is proposed in this paper. Firstly, a PF model is built to describe the potential risk of the traffic entities, including the obstacles, road boundaries and lines. The potential fields of these traffic entities are determined by their properties and the traffic regulations. Secondly, the planning algorithm is presented, which comprises three modules: state prediction, state search and trajectory generation.

A rapid path-planning algorithm that generates drivable paths for an autonomous vehicle operating in structural road is proposed in this paper. Cubic B-spline curve is adopted to generating smooth path for continuous curvature and, more, parametric basic points of the spline is adjusted to controlling the curvature extremum for kinematic constraints on vehicle. Other than previous approaches such as inverse kinematics, model-based prediction postprocess approach or closed-loop forward simulation, using the kinematics model in each iteration of path for smoothing and controlling curvature leading to time consumption increasing, our method characterized the vehicle curvature constraint by the minimum length of segment line, which synchronously realized constraint and smooth for generating path. And Differ from the path of robot escaping from a maze, the intelligent vehicle traveling on road in structured environments needs to meet the traffic rules.

To solve the problem of serious roller wear and improve the smoothness of the sliding door motion process, the rigid-flexible coupling multi-body model of the vehicle sliding door was built in ADAMS. Force boundary conditions of the model were determined to meet the speed requirement of monitoring point and time requirement of door opening-closing process according to the bench test specification. The results of dynamic simulation agreed well with that of test so the practicability and credibility of the model was verified. In the optimization of the ride comfort of the sliding door, two different schemes were proposed. The one was to optimize the position of hinge pivots and the other was to optimize the structural parameters of the middle guide. The impact load of lead roller on middle guide, the curvature of the motion trajectory and angular acceleration of the sliding door centroid were taken as optimization objectives.

Speech enhancement can extract clean speech from noise interference, enhancing its perceptual quality and intelligibility. This technology has significant applications in in-car intelligent voice interaction. However, the complex noise environment inside the vehicle, especially the human voice interference is very prominent, which brings great challenges to the vehicle speech interaction system. In this paper, we propose a speech enhancement method based on target speech features, which can better extract clean speech and improve the perceptual quality and intelligibility of enhanced speech in the environment of human noise interference. To this end, we propose a design method for the middle layer of the U-Net architecture based on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), which can automatically extract the target speech features that are highly distinguishable from the noise signal and human voice interference features in noisy speech, and realize the targeted extraction of clean speech.

Gesture control has been increasingly applied to automotive industry to reduce the distraction caused by in-vehicle interactions to the primary task of driving. The aim of this study is to find out if gestures can reasonably be used to control in-car devices. Since there exists a big cultural difference of gesture between different countries because of its particularity, a set of gestures which support intuitive human-machine interaction in an automotive environment is searched. The results show a gesture dictionary for a variety of on-board functions, which conforms to Chinese drivers’ driving habits. Furthermore, this paper also describes a driving simulator test to evaluate the usability of gesture from different aspects including the effectiveness, efficiency, satisfaction, memorability and security. Static driving simulator is considered as an excellent environment for the in-car secondary task as its high safety level, repeatability and reliability.

On the study of reducing the disturbance on driver’s attention induced by low frequency vehicle interior stationary noise, a subjective evaluation is firstly carried out by means of rank rating method which introduces Distraction Level (DL) as evaluation index. A visual-finger response test is developed to help evaluating members better recognize the Distraction Level during the evaluation. A non-linear back propagation artificial neural network (BPANN) is then modeled for the prediction of subjective Distraction Level, in which linear sound pressure RMS amplitudes of five Critical Band Rates (CBRs) from 20 to 500Hz are selected as inputs of the model. These inputs comprise an input vector of BPANN. Furthermore, active noise equalization (ANE) on DL is realized based on Filtered-x Least Mean Square (FxLMS) algorithm that controls the gain coefficients of inputs of trained BPANN.

Lane Keeping Assistance System (LKAS) is a typical lateral driver assistance system with low acceptance. One of the main reasons is that fixed parameters cannot satisfy individual differences. So LKAS adaptive to driver characteristics needs to be designed. Driver Steering Override (DSO) process is an important process of LKAS. It happens when contradiction between driver’s intention and system behavior occurs. As feeling of overriding will affect the overall experience of using LKAS, the design of DSO characteristics is worthy of attention. This research provided an adaptive design scheme aiming at DSO characteristics for LKAS by building Driver Preference Model (DPM) based on simulator test data from preliminary experiments. The DPM was to represent the relationship between driver characteristics indices and driver preferred system characteristics indices. So that new drivers’ preference can be predicted by DPM based on their own daily driving data with LKAS switched off.

An integrated-electro-hydraulic brake system (I-EHB) is presented to fulfill the requirements of active safety. Because I-EHB can control the brake pressure accurately and fast. Furthermore I-EHB is a decoupled system, so it could make the maximum regenerative braking while offers the same brake pedal feeling and also good for ADAS and unmanned driving application. Based on the analysis of current electrohydraulic brake systems, regulation requirements and the requirements for brake system, the operating mode requirements of I-EHB are formed. Furthermore, system topological structure and a conceptual design are proposed. After the selection of key components, the parameter design is accomplished by modeling the system. According to the above-mentioned design method, an I-EHB prototype and test rig is made. Through the test rig, characteristics of the system are tested. Results show that this I-EHB system responded rapidly.

Harmony-with-traffic refers to the ability of autonomous vehicles to maximize the driving benefits such as comfort, efficiency, and energy consumption of themselves and the surrounding traffic during interactive driving under traffic rules. In the test of harmony-with-traffic, one or more background vehicles that can respond to the driving behavior of the vehicle under test are required. For this purpose, the functional requirements of car-following model for harmony-with-traffic evaluation are analyzed from the dimensions of test conditions, constraints, steady state and dynamic response. Based on them, an interactive car-following model (ICFM) is developed. In this model, the concept of equivalent distance is proposed to transfer lateral influence to longitudinal. The calculation methods of expected speed are designed according to the different car-following modes divided by interaction object, reaction distance and equivalent distance.

Real-time interaction between a driver and the simulator is problematic. In this study, the racing car driving simulator has been established, which is composed of the following functional components: Motion Controller, Simview, Scenario Editor, Application Programmer Interface (APIs) and Crash Simulation. With TCP/IP protocol, the Motion Controller receives driver's manipulation, road unevenness and crash situation of Simview, then generates motion streams that reflecting the current conditions, and sends them to Simview and to the hydraulic platform. Furthermore, by detecting and analyzing general vehicle two-dimensional impact, a kind of complete and applicable calculation method has been established, and complicated vehicle impacts can be analyzed accurately. This racecar driving simulator places a racing driver in a interactive environment, and provides the driver with high-fidelity motion, visual, auditory, and force feedback cues.

The turbocharger air intake noise during transient conditions like wide open throttle and tip-in/out affects the passenger ride comfort. This paper aims to study an optimized design of multi-chamber perforated resonators to attenuate this noise. The noise produced by a turbocharger in a test vehicle has been measured to find out the noise spectral characteristics which can be used to design the acoustic targets including the amplitude and frequency range of transmission loss (TL). The structural parameters of the resonators are optimized based on genetic algorithm (GA) and two-dimensional prediction theory of the resonator TL. The optimized resonators are installed on the test vehicle to verify the actual noise reduction effect. The results suggest that the broadband noise has been eliminated, and subjective feelings are greatly improved.

Based on the emergency lane change cases extracted from the China naturalistic driving data, the driving steering behavior divides into three phases: collision avoidance, lateral movement and steering stabilization. Using the steering primitive fitting by Gaussian function, the distribution of the duration time, the relationship between steering wheel rate and deflection were analyzed in three phases. It is shown that the steering behavior essentially is composed of steering primitives during the emergency lane-change. However, the combination of the steering primitives is different according to the specific steering constraints in three phases. In the collision avoidance phase, a single steering primitive with high peak is used for the fast steering; in the lateral movement and stabilization phase, a combination of two or even more steering primitives is built to a more accurate steering.

Noise signals of the driver’s right ear include those of engine, environment, chassis dynamometer, loaded gears and unloaded gears when they are recorded in full vehicle on chassis dynamometer in semi-anechoic room. Gear rattle noise signals of the driver’s right ear caused by unloaded gear pairs can’t be identified or quantified directly. To solve the problems, relative approaches are used to identify and quantify the gear rattle noise signals. Firstly, the rattle noise signals of the driver’s right ear are filtered by human ear characteristic functions and steady noise signals are extracted by regression and smoothing processes. The noise signals are regressed at 200ms interval in the hearing critical frequency bands and smoothed in the flanking frequencies. Then, the noise relative approaches are obtained by subtracting the steady noise signals from the filtered noise signals, which are the transient noise signals of the unloaded gear pairs inducing the rattle noise.

X-in-the-loop (XiL) framework is a validation concept for vehicle product development, which integrates different virtual and physical components to improve the development efficiency. In order to develop and validate an extended validation method based on XiL, Tongji University in Shanghai, China and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Karlsruhe, Germany co- performed a feasibility study about an X-in-the-distance-loop demonstration platform. The X-in-the-distance-loop demonstration platform includes a MATLAB/Simulink software platform and geographically distributed equipment (driver simulator, driving electric motor and dynamometer test stand), which are used to conduct bidirectional experiments to test communication of powertrain data between China and Germany.

Lane-keeping assist system (LKA) alerts the driver or intervenes in the driving when the vehicle deviates from the lane. But its effect is highly dependent on the driver’s acceptance. Distance to Lane Crossing (DTLC) and Time to Lane Crossing (TTLC) are two important factors to consider the danger level of the scenario, which are also two references for drivers to make decisions. At present, most of the functional design standards are based on these values, while they often differ for different vehicle movements. This study uses a driving robot to precisely control the test conditions and performs field tests on two advanced autonomous vehicles in National Intelligent Connected Vehicle (Shanghai) Pilot Zone. The test conditions are extended based on various test standards and the LKA performance of vehicles in the pre-experiment.

A driver steering model for emergency lane change based on the China naturalistic driving data is proposed in this paper. The steering characteristic of three phases is analyzed. Using the steering primitive fitting by Gaussian function, the steering behaviors in collision avoidance and lateral movement phases can be described, and the stabilization steering principle of yaw rate null is found. Based on the steering characteristic, the near and far aim point used in steering phases is analyzed. Using the near and far aim point correction model, a driver steering model for emergency lane change is established. The research results show that the driver emergency steering model proposed in this paper performs well when explaining realistic steering behavior, and this model can be used in developing the ADAS system.

Driver behaviors provide abundant information and feedback for future Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). Driver’s eye and head may present some typical movement patterns before executing driving maneuvers. It is possible to use driver’s head and eye movement information for predicting driver intention. Therefore, to determine the most important features related to driver intention has attracted widespread research interests. In this paper, a method to analyze the correlation between driver’s visual features and driver intention is proposed, aiming to determine the most representative features for driver intention prediction. Firstly, naturalistic driving experiment is conducted to collect driver’s videos during executing lane keeping and lane change maneuvers. Then, driver’s head and face visual features are extracted from those videos. By using boxplot and independent samples T-test, features which have significant correlation with driver intention are found.

For the personification of automotive vehicle function performance under common traffic scenarios, analysis of human driver behavior is necessary. Based on China Field Operational Test (China-FOT) database of China Natural Driving Study project, this paper studies the driver's response in the common cut-in scenario. A total of 266 cut-in cases are selected by manual interception of driving recorder video. The relevant traffic environment characteristics are also extracted from video, including light conditions, road conditions, scale and lateral position of cut-in vehicle, etc. Dynamic information is decoded form CAN, such as speed, acceleration and so on. Then image processing results, such as relative speed and distance of cut-in and subject vehicles, are calculated. Statistical results based on above information show the response type and distribution of human driver: the behavior of keeping lane is 96.24%, in which the ratio of braking response is 51.13%.