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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.

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.

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.

In order to improve the drivability and reduce the clutch friction loss, low-cost slope sensor is used in hill-start control of AMT vehicles. After the power spectrum analysis of the original signal and the design of the digital filter, the angle of the slope is obtained with short enough delay and small enough noise. By using this slope angle information, slope resistance force can be calculated online so that the vehicle can be prevented from sliding backward and optimal launch control can be realized. The digital filter of slope angle signal and the optimal controller of dry clutch engagement are embedded in the TCU (Transmission Control Unit) of a micro-car Geely Panda. Real-vehicle experiments are carried out with optimal clutch controller, which shows that the hill-start with low-cost slope sensor and optimal clutch controller can provide successful vehicle launch with little driveline shock. In addition, it can also avoid backward sliding and engine over-speed effectively.

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.

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.

A novel torque-coupling architecture for hybrid electric vehicles is proposed. The torque-coupling device is based on automated manual transmission (AMT), which is highly efficient and provides six gears for the engine and three gears for each motor to enable the engine and the motors to work at high-efficiency levels in most cases. The proposed power-shift AMT (P-AMT) does not have a hydraulic torque converter and wet clutches, which dampen the driveline shock. Thus, the drivability control of the P-AMT becomes a challenging issue. Accurate engine, motor model and transmission model have been built and the dynamic control of the gear shift process of PAMT in hybrid mode is simulated. The electric motors compensate for the traction loss during the gear shift of the engine.

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.

The steer-by-wire system has been widely studied due to many advantages such as good controllability. In the system, the steering column is cancelled and the driver can't feel the feedback torque (also called steering feeling) coming from the ground. Therefore a steering feeling feedback system is needed. In this paper, we propose a simple method to calculate desired feedback torque based on a nonlinear 2DOF vehicle model. The vehicle model contains the nonlinearity of tire. So that the proposed method is also appropriate for big acceleration conditions. Besides that, the properties of steering system such as friction and stiffness are also taken into consideration. As for conventional steering system, driver can only feel part of the feedback torque due to the power assist system. In order to provide steering feeling similar to conventional steering system, a weighting function is proposed to compensate the influence of power assist system.