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Self-piercing rivet (SPR) joints are a key joining technology for lightweight materials, and they have been widely used in automobile manufacturing. Manual visual crack inspection of SPR joints could be time-consuming and relies on high-level training for engineers to distinguish features subjectively. This paper presents a novel machine learning-based crack detection method for SPR joint button images. Firstly, sub-images are cropped from the button images and preprocessed into three categories (i.e., cracks, edges and smooth regions) as training samples. Then, the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is chosen as the classification algorithm for sub-images. In the training of ANN, three pattern descriptors are proposed as feature extractors of sub-images, and compared with validation samples. Lastly, a search algorithm is developed to extend the application of the learned model from sub-images into the original button images.

As pedestrian protection tests and evaluations have been officially incorporated into new C-NCAP, more stringent requirements have been placed on pedestrian protection performance. In this study, in order to reduce the injury of the vehicle front end structure to the pedestrian's lower extremity during the collision, the advanced pedestrian legform impactor (aPLI) model was used in conjunction with the finite element vehicle model for collision simulation based on the new C-NCAP legform test evaluation regulation. This paper selected the key components which have significant influences on the pedestrian's leg protection performance based on the CAE vehicle model, including front bumper, front-cover plate, upper impact pillar, impact beam and lower support plate, to form a simplified model and conducted parametric modeling based on it.

UGV (Unmanned Ground Vehicle) is gaining increasing amounts of attention from both industry and academic communities in recent years. Local trajectory planning is one of the most important parts of designing a UGV. However, there has been little research into local trajectory planning and tracking, and current research has not considered the dynamic of the surrounding environment. Therefore, we propose a dynamic local trajectory planning and tracking method for UGV driving on the highway in this paper. The method proposed in this paper can make the UGV travel from the navigation starting point to the navigation end point without collision on both straight and curve road. The key technology for this method is trajectory planning, trajectory tracking and trajectory update signal generation. Trajectory planning algorithm calculates a reference trajectory satisfying the demands of safety, comfort and traffic efficiency.

In real-world engineering problems, the method of model simplification is usually adopted to increase the simulation efficiency. Nevertheless, the obtained simulation results are commonly with low accuracy. To research the impact from model simplification on simulation results, a feature-based predictive method for simplified CAE model analysis is proposed in this paper. First, the point clouds are used to represent the features of simplified model. Then the features are quantified according to the factors of position for further analysis. A formulated predictive model is then established to evaluate the responses of interest for different models, which are specified by the employed simplification methods. The proposed method is demonstrated through an engineering case. The results suggest that the predictive model can facilitate the analysis procedure to reduce the cost in CAE analysis.

Vehicle weight reduction has become one of the essential research areas in the automotive industry. It is important to perform design optimization of Body-in-White (BIW) at the concept design phase so that to reduce the development cost and shorten the time-to-market in later stages. Finite Element (FE) models are commonly used for vehicle design. However, even with increasing speed of computers, the simulation of FE models is still too time-consuming due to the increased complexity of models. This calls for the development of a systematic and efficient approach that can effectively perform vehicle weight reduction, while satisfying the stringent safety regulations and constraints of development time and cost. In this paper, an efficient BIW weight reduction approach is proposed with consideration of complex safety and stiffness performances. A parametric BIW FE model is first constructed, followed by the building of surrogate models for the responses of interest.

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.

Significant progress in modeling techniques has greatly enhanced the application of computer simulations in vehicle safety. However, the fine-meshed impact models are usually complex and take lots of computational resources and time to conduct design optimization. Hence, to develop effective methods to simplify the impact models without losing necessary accuracy is of significant meaning in vehicle crashworthiness analysis. Surface deformation is frequently regarded as a critical factor to be measured for validating the accuracy of CAE models. This paper proposes an integrated validation framework to evaluate the inconsistencies between the deformed surfaces of the original model and simplified model. The geometric features and curvature information of the deformed surfaces are firstly obtained from crash simulation. Then, the magnitude and shape discrepancy information are integrated into the validation framework as the surface comparison objects.

Accident statistics have shown that older and obese occupants are less adaptable to existing vehicle occupant restraint systems than ordinary middle-aged male occupants, and tend to have higher injury risk in vehicle crashes. However, the current research on injury mechanism of aging and obese occupants in vehicle frontal impacts is scarce. This paper focuses on the optimization design method of occupant restraint system parameters for specific body type characteristics. Three parameters, namely the force limit value of the force limiter in the seat belt, pretensioner preload of the seat belt and the proportionality coefficient of mass flow rate of the inflator were used for optimization. The objective was to minimize the injury risk probability subjected to constraints of occupant injury indicator values for various body regions as specified in US-NCAP frontal impact tests requirements.

In recent years, aimed to promote the improvement of China’s new energy vehicle market, a series of incentive policies issued by the Chinese government: including the new energy vehicle subsidy policy, the double credit policy, and the charging pile infrastructure subsidy.Relevant research on new energy vehicle industry is mainly ground on multi-stage game, this paper employs multi-agent games theory, and summarizes the multi-agent decision-making optimization method in differential game based on dynamic programming and reinforcement learning. Then, in the context of new energy vehicles, research and improve the industrial policy of new energy vehicles through this method.A multi-agent differential game decision-making optimization framework is proposed. Complex multi-agent differential game decisions can be solved using the dynamic programming solver or deep reinforcement learning solver in this framework. Case studies and some observations will be given in the end.

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.

With the development of science and technology, breakthroughs have been made in the fields of intelligent algorithms, environmental perception, chip embedding, scene analysis, and multi-information fusion, which has prompted the wide attention of society, manufacturers and owners of autonomous vehicles. As one of the key issues in the research of autonomous vehicles, the research of vehicle lane change algorithm is of great significance to the safety of vehicle driving. This paper focuses on the conflict of interest between the lane-changing vehicle and the target lane vehicle in the fully autonomous driving environment, and proposes the method of coupling kinematics and game theory, so that when the vehicle is in the process of lane changing game, the lane-changing vehicle and the target lane vehicle can make decisions that are beneficial to the balance of interests of both sides.

The use of lightweight materials is one of the important means to reduce the quality of the vehicle, which involves the connection of dissimilar materials, such as the combination of lightweight materials and traditional steel materials. The riveting quality of self-piercing riveting (SPR) technology will directly affect the safety and durability of automobiles. Therefore, in the initial joint development process, the quality of self-piercing riveting should be inspected and classified to meet safety standards. Based on this, this paper divides the self-piercing riveting quality into riveting appearance quality and riveting section quality. Aiming at the appearance quality of riveting, the generation of cracks on the lower surface of riveting will seriously affect the riveting strength. The existing method of identifying cracks on the lower surface of riveting based on artificial vision has strong subjectivity, low efficiency and cannot be applied on a large scale.

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.

Most traffic accidents are caused by the driving behavior of drivers, so the study of driving behavior plays an important role in traffic safety. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive system for evaluating driver driving behavior safety, including classification and prediction of driver driving styles, as well as comprehensive scoring of driving behaviors. The driving behavior dataset needs to be pre-processed first. After that, we extracted driving behaviors and indicators, and performed cluster analysis on the reconstructed data to obtain three styles: conservative, aggressive, and impatient. We introduced a BP neural network to predict driving styles and obtained a relatively high prediction accuracy. Finally, we calculated the combined subjective and objective weights of the five behaviors and combined them with the developed scoring function to evaluate the driving safety of all drivers with a comprehensive score.

Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) has become a vital tool for product development in automotive industry. Increasing computer models are developed to simulate vehicle crashworthiness, dynamic, and fuel efficiency. Before applying these models for product development, model validation needs to be conducted to assess the validity of the models. However, one of the key difficulties for model validation of dynamic systems is that most of the responses are functional responses, such as time history curves. This calls for the development of an objective metric which can evaluate the differences of both the time history and the key features, such as phase shift, magnitude, and slope between test and CAE curves. One of the promising metrics is Error Assessment of Response Time Histories (EARTH), which was recently developed. Three independent error measures that associated with physically meaningful characteristics (phase, magnitude, and slope) were proposed.

With the development of science and technology, breakthroughs have been made in the fields of intelligent algorithms, environmental perception, chip embedding, scene analysis, and multi-information fusion, which together prompted the wide attention of society, manufacturers and owners of autonomous vehicles. As one of the key issues in the research of autonomous vehicles, the research of vehicle lane change algorithm is of great significance to the safety of vehicle driving. This paper focuses on the conflict of interest between the lane-changing vehicle and the target lane vehicle in the fully autonomous driving environment, and proposes the method of coupling kinematics and game theory and reinforcement learning based optimization, so that when the vehicle is in the process of lane changing game, the lane-changing vehicle and the target lane vehicle can make decisions that are beneficial to the balance of interests of both sides.

Intelligent driving is an important research direction in the field of artificial intelligence. The fourth industrial revolution represented by the Internet of things provides more prospects for the development of intelligent vehicles. Trajectory planning and tracking control is one of the key technologies of intelligent driving vehicle. This paper takes intelligent driving vehicle as the starting point and establishes a research method of intelligent vehicle trajectory planning based on particle swarm optimization, based on the vehicle kinematics and dynamics model, a model predictive control algorithm is built for trajectory tracking control, the simulation scene is built by Prescan, the vehicle dynamics parameters are set in Carsim, and then the joint simulation is carried out with Simulink.

In recent years, game theory and reinforcement learning have become very popular research fields in today's society. As the most strategic analysis and optimization research method, they can be used in the study of subsidy strategy of China's new energy automobile industry to solve the problems caused by the government's subsidy of new energy vehicles. This paper studies the evaluation methods and strategy optimization methods of government subsidy strategies in different situations, and applies them to the subsidy strategies and other strategy optimization problems of new energy vehicles in China. Firstly, based on game theory, this paper studies the evaluation method of government subsidy strategy in the case of “double reciprocity” and “one strong and one weak” by constructing the game process of “double reciprocity” enterprises and “one strong and one weak” enterprises.