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Due to the uncertainty of vehicle model parameters, modeling errors and external disturbances, the performance of path tracking control system is poor, especially under high velocity and large curvature extreme conditions. To address this issue, this paper presents a novel gain-scheduled robust control strategy based on linear parameter varying system with model predictive control (MPC) and H∞. Firstly, fully considering the influence of the time-varying characteristics of vehicle velocity and tire cornering stiffness on the path tracking system model, a novel linear parameter varying system model is built for path tracking control of autonomous vehicle. Then, a path tracking robust controller is designed based on gain-scheduled approach, and the linear matrix inequality (LMI) is applied to solve optimization problem, in which MPC and H∞ robust control theory are applied to the controller design process. Finally, the simulation experiments have verified that the proposed novel robust control strategy can improve the path tracking accuracy and ensure the vehicle lateral and roll stability, especially under high velocity and large curvature extreme conditions. Meanwhile, the proposed robust controller shows superiority to suppress the parameters uncertainty, modeling error and external disturbance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the paper is to define a limit performance of highly efficient battery electric quadricycles for urban mobility. The vehicle is employed for an energy efficiency competition in which urban concepts compete. A multi-physics (thermo-electro-mechanical) Tank To Wheels (TTW) model has been developed and validated. Given the information on the track route (track map and elevation) and on the throttle input command, the model computes the vehicle power demand and cruising speed. The model is validated by means of both indoor and outdoor experimental tests. The validated model is employed for the optimization of the transmission gear ratio and of the driving strategy to minimize the overall energy consumption on a given track. Design variables are related to the transmission gear ratio and to the throttle command profile. The algorithm aims to minimize the energy consumption, including constraints on the maximum current provided by the battery and on the maximum time available to complete the lap. Comparison with some common driving strategies confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed solution, with a foreseen 9% reduction of the vehicle overall energy demand. The single seater ultra-efficient electric vehicle, compared to other urban quadricycles, has a battery capacity ten times lower and a 50% longer driving range. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Path planning and path following are key technologies for autonomous vehicles. Strong nonlinearity, coupling characteristics, parametric uncertainties, external disturbances, and complicated driving scenarios put forward great challenges in estimation, control, and optimization of autonomous vehicles. Multi-dimension information utilization offers an effective solution to cope with the foregoing challenges. The presented research proposes a path planning and tracking framework for optimal design and regulation of control variables for collision avoidance and active guidance system, aiming to improve tracking performance and system robustness. For path planning approach, a virtual harmful potential field in 3 dimension (3D) is built to provide a collision-free trajectory as a reference path for path following, depending on vehicle kinematic model and boundary conditions of roads. A linear parameter-varying, polytopic vehicle lateral model is developed to address the issues of time-variable longitudinal speeds and preview distance on vehicle lateral stability management. Further, a strong robust gain-scheduling path following control approach based on linear matrix inequality methodology is proposed to tackle problems relating to characteristics of temporal variations, parametric uncertainties and external disturbances. Comparisons study under the TruckMaker/Xpack4-RapidECU joint HIL platform demonstrate that both tracking precision and high robustness to parametric uncertainties and external disturbances are superior than model predictive control method. The presented path following method provides an important insight into exploiting the robust control method's favorable merits while guaranteeing its computing efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the control chassis dynamics of a light electric vehicle. In the frame of Global Chassis Control, it proposes a hierarchical control approach focuses on compensating the chassis dynamics against driver disturbances. It is based on a supervisory structure consists of two main levels, a global controller for regulating chassis variables and a local controller to each suspension system. Both controllers are designed using a fractional-order robust controller, namely CRONE controller, to provide an optimized solution for the performance-robustness tradeoff. The main objective is to improve ride comfort for passengers while respecting road holding and handling criteria. In contrast to other studies, random road disturbances are considered to investigate the limits of the proposed approach. Analysis in frequency and time domain has been done to evaluate the performance and robustness of the designed controller. Simulation results based on a full nonlinear 14 degree of freedom vehicle model show that the proposed strategy can effectively improve the ride quality in the field of interest where a significant performance in driver disturbance rejection is reported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Model predictive control (MPC) in automotive active safety applications has gained great success in recent years. Detailed vehicle models along with a receding horizon control scheme seek the optimal control distribution among actuators for enhanced performances while satisfying system constraints. To promote the re-usability and scalability of MPC-based vehicular active safety systems, an agent-based MPC (AMPC) is proposed in our previous study for a modularized control architecture. In this paper, implementation of the control scheme is demonstrated on an all-wheel-drive test platform. Both centralized and agent-based MPCs for vehicular stability are compared for their control performances as well as computational costs on embedded hardware. It is shown from experimental results that agent-based MPC is more flexible and computationally efficient in handling vehicle active safety challenges while gives no compromise to control performances compared to their holistically formulated counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes priority-based distributed access control in vehicular networks. Characterizing the spatial correlation between vehicles, users, and roads, this paper uses Cox point processes to model vehicles and users, respectively. Then, this paper proposes that each vehicle transmits if it has the highest priority among all of its neighbors. Using the stochastic geometry framework, this paper derives the probability that a typical vehicle is retained to transmit. Then, this paper derives a second-order moment measure of the retained point process to evaluate the signal-to-interference (SIR) distribution of a typical user. The derived SIR distribution is compared to the system-level simulation of the SIR distribution of a typical user. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Longitudinal velocity, lateral velocity, and front wheel steering angle are crucial states for vehicle active safety features. However, direct measurement of these variables requires expensive measurement instruments and can be easily affected by vehicle nonlinear dynamics, outliers and noise pollution. Moreover, unknown inputs bring great challenges to their accurate estimation. Therefore, this paper develops a novel robust unscented M-estimation-based filter (RUMF) for vehicle state estimation with unknown driver steering torque. The nonlinear system model is constructed based on the vehicle dynamics model. Unscented transformation (UT) and statistical linearization are implemented to transform the nonlinear process and measurement function into a linear-like regression form with data redundancy to achieve outlier suppression. Then, an M-estimation-based iterated algorithm is designed to address process uncertainty and innovation and observation outliers for robust vehicle state estimation. The iteratively reweighted least-squares (IRLS) method based on the M-estimation methodology is utilized for unknown input estimation. Simulations and experimental results compared with extended Kalman filter (EKF) and particle filter (PF) have verified the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Appropriate vehicle lateral stability control is the key to ensure vehicle driving safety, whereas accurate lateral stability recognition can help improve the performance of vehicle control. In this article, the vehicle stability recognition and coordinated control are studied. Firstly, the vehicle dynamic model is established, through vehicle simulation software Carsim, the attribute dataset representing the vehicle lateral stability is further obtained. Then, clustering by fast search and find of density peaks method (CFSFDP) based procedure for the classification of the lateral stability as ‘Absolutely stability’, ‘Nearly stability’ and ‘Hardly stability’ is applied. The brain emotional learning network combined with genetic algorithm (GA-BEL) model is used to train datasets to recognize vehicle stability categories during driving. For the different recognition results, a coordinated control strategy based on active front steering control (AFS) and direct yaw moment control (DYC) is designed finally. Through the Carsim/Simulink co-simulations and Hardware-in-the-Loop tests under several typical driving conditions, the superiorities of the stability recognition method and the coordinated control strategy proposed in this paper are verified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robust and adaptive vehicle state estimation and tracking algorithms have become a very important part within the autonomous driving field. The family of interacting multiple model (IMM) filters has shown to provide very effective and accurate state estimation in systems whose behavior patterns change significantly over time. The main reason for the improved performance of IMM filters compared to single model approaches is the mode mixing, which constantly aligns the different models. This paper proposes an innovative way for the mode mixing, when the state-vectors of the models are of different size. The proposed mixing approach consists of two parts: firstly mixing the common states and secondly weighting between original and mixed states based on the model probabilities. Results from artificial simulations and real world measurement setups are shown to demonstrate the validity of the approach. Compared to previously suggested solutions, the proposed approach is more general and the overall complexity of the mode mixing step is reduced, which is the main contribution of the presented paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A novel longitudinal, lateral, and vertical integrated stability control system is proposed for distributed electric vehicle in this paper. The integrated stability control system is based on model predictive control and takes advantage of its multi-objective optimization feature to takes manipulability, stability and comfort requirements into consideration at the same time, and realize the optimal longitudinal $/$ lateral $/$ vertical forces distribution with constraints overall considered. The advantage of the proposed integrated control system is that it can solve the control objective conflict of the cooperative motion control subsystems and the interference of the actuators compared to distributed control system. Finally, the simulation and comparison analysis are given in several different driving conditions under Carsim and Matlab $/$ Simulink environment. Results show that an improvement of over 80 $\%$ in the pitch angle and roll angle is realized compared to the simple control strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a novel estimation and identification approach for lateral vehicle dynamics. The algorithm leverages on a Linear Fraction Transform (LFT) reformulation of vehicle and tyre models, allowing for a simple and computationally efficient inclusion of complex and nonlinear dynamic models, like, for example, two-wheels, four-wheels or single-track as vehicle model, and Pacejka, brush or Fiala as tyre model. As a result, this technique can be easily adopted in the development of an online identification system, able to run on a standard embedded device, implementing a flexible identification procedure that can handle different driving conditions, up to the limits of handling, different vehicle modelling approaches, and different input measurements. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposal, either in a persistent excitation and in a non-persistent excitation scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Message exchange among vehicles plays an important role in ensuring road safety. Emergency message dissemination is usually carried out by broadcasting. However, high vehicle density and mobility lead to challenges in message dissemination such as broadcasting storm and low probability of packet reception. This paper proposes a federated learning based blockchain-assisted message dissemination solution. Similar to the incentive-based Proof-of-Work consensus in blockchain, vehicles compete to become a relay node (miner) by processing the proposed Proof-of-Federated-Learning (PoFL) consensus which is embedded in the smart contract of blockchain. Both theoretical and practical analysis of the proposed solution are provided. Specifically, the proposed blockchain based federated learning results in more vehicles uploading their models in a given time, which can potentially lead to a more accurate model in less time as compared to the same solution without using blockchain. It also outperforms other blockchain approaches in reducing 65.2% of time delay in consensus, improving at least 8.2% message delivery rate and preserving privacy of neighbor vehicle more efficiently. The economic model to incentivize vehicles participating in federated learning and message dissemination is further analyzed using Stackelberg game. The analysis of asymptotic complexity proves PoFL as the most scalable solution compared to other consensus algorithms in vehicular networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Path planning is a critical part for improving the driving safety and driver comfort of autonomous vehicles (AVs), especially in complex maneuvering conditions. In addition, different drivers have different preferences for AVs, thus, how to provide personalized trajectories for different drivers is a vital issue for AVs. The collision-free path planning problem in conditions with large road curvatures is investigated in this paper, with the consideration of environmental safety constraints, drivers’ comfort, vehicle actuator constraints, etc. Firstly, a Driver-Vehicle-Road (DVR) system is established based on the combination of the kinematic vehicle model and the two-point visual preview driver model, such that the driver's individual handling characteristics can be considered in the controller. The kinematic vehicle model is modified to have the similar understeering characteristics with those of the nonlinear full car models, and then the proposed DVR system can satisfy different groups of drivers and cars. Secondly, for environmental constraints, a new artificial potential field (APF) method is proposed, which can form a banana-shaped 3-D dangerous imaginary mountain and a lane boundary cliff suitable for arbitrary curvature roads to generate a collision-free evasive path. Finally, the Linear-Time-Varying (LTV) model predictive control (MPC) method is adopted to design the path planner. The CarSim-Simulink joint simulation illustrates that with the proposed planner, the host vehicle is capable of avoiding obstacles with a safer and more comfortable maneuver on large curvature roads. And the proposed path planner can provide individually safe trajectories for different drivers with good maneuverability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Controller Area Network is the most frequently used in-vehicle communication system in the automotive industry today. The communication inside the Controller Area Network (CAN) bus is typically encoded using proprietary formats in order to prevent easy access to the information exchanged on the bus. However, it is still possible to decode this information through reverse engineering, performed either manually or via automated tools. Existing automated CAN bus reverse engineering methods are still time-consuming and require some manual effort, i.e., to inject diagnostic messages in order to trigger specific responses. In this paper, we propose CANMatch – a fully automated CAN bus reverse engineering framework that does not require any manual effort and significantly decreases the execution time by exploiting the reuse of CAN frames across different vehicle models. We evaluate the proposed solution on a dataset of CAN logs, or traces, related to 479 vehicles from 29 different automotive manufacturers, demonstrating its improved performance with respect to the state of the art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work, a novel single-level adaptive trajectory planner and tracking controller is developed for off-road autonomous vehicles operating on deformable terrains. Trajectory planning and tracking algorithms often rely on a simplified vehicle model to predict future vehicle states based upon control inputs, hence requiring accurate modeling and parameterization. On off-road deformable terrains this is a challenging task due to unknown terrain parameters and the complex interactions at tire-terrain interfaces, which pose issues in continuous differentiability, operating conditions, and computational time. To address these difficulties, in this paper, a neural network deformable terrain terramechanics model and its implementation within a terrain adaptive model predictive control algorithm is presented to improve vehicle safety and performance through more accurate prediction of the plant response. It is shown in simulations that the neural network is able to predict the lateral tire forces accurately and efficiently compared to the Soil Contact Model as a state-of-the-art model and is able to yield accurate bicycle model predictions. It is demonstrated that the implementation of the neural network within model predictive control can outperform both a baseline Pacejka-based and a rapidly exploring random tree controller by improving performance and allowing for more severe maneuvers to be completed that otherwise lead to failure when terrain deformations are not explicitly taken into account. The improved performance achieved through estimating terrain parameters online in an adaptive controller is highlighted against the nonadaptive realization. Finally, it is shown the algorithm is conducive to real-time implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energy storage devices such as batteries and supercapacitors are arousing a growing interest in many areas of industrial applications since they allow improving the dynamic response and efficiency. In this sense, the availability of electric models of batteries and supercapacitors is necessary for the correct sizing, control, and energy management of power systems. In order to identify the parameters of the equivalent electric model, the identification current profile is often a pulse of charge or discharge. Subsequently, these models are validated with a current verification profile. However, the verification profile compared to the identification profile is more dynamic in amplitude and frequency, producing validation errors due to the identification signal's limited bandwidth. This paper proposes a novel Pulse – Pseudo Random Binary Sequence (Pulse – PRBS) identification current profile, with similar spectral characteristics to the verification profile, in order to improve the modeling accuracy. The parameters of a Lithium-ion battery and a supercapacitor are obtained with this new identification current profile and the Optimization Toolbox of Matlab, using the electrical models in Simulink or Simscape. Finally, the models are validated with the Urban Driving Cycle ECE-15 and the Hybrid Pulse Power Characterization (HPPC) for electric vehicle applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In vehicle trajectory prediction, the difficulty in modeling the interaction relationship between vehicles lies in constructing the interaction structure between the vehicles in the traffic scene. Majority of existing models only focus on the interaction between the historical trajectory of the vehicle and the surrounding vehicles in the spatial domain, and do not pay attention to the interaction between the vehicle and the non-Euclidean correlation structure (graph structure) that exists in the environment. In order to overcome the deficiencies in the existing models, this paper proposes the Environment-Attention Network model (EA-Net) to obtain the full interactive information between the vehicle and its driving environment. In the proposed model, a new type of parallel structure consisting of Graph Attention network (GAT) and Convolutional social pooling containing Squeeze-and-Extraction mechanism (SE-CS), is constructed as the environmental feature extraction module and embedded in LSTM encoder-decoder. This structure solves the limitation of the dimension and structure influence when constructing the interaction model between the vehicle and the surrounding environment, making the extracted feature information comprehensive and effective. The prediction accuracy of the model with the RMSE loss function is tested on two public datasets– NGSIM and highD, and compared with several state-of-the-art trajectory prediction algorithm models. The results show that the prediction accuracy of the proposed Environment-Attention Network in the two datasets is more than 20% higher than that of the single structure model, which indicates that the proposed model proposed has superior performance and better adaptability to different traffic environments compared with the existing models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While bringing convenience to people, the growing number of vehicles already on roads causes inevitable traffic congestion. Traffic congestion can happen for both observable reasons, such as accidents, or occur naturally due to human driving style in high vehicles density scenarios. In the latter case, traffic congestion are referred to as phantom jams. To alleviate the traffic instability caused by phantom jams, bilateral control models have been proposed with the development of intelligent transportation system (ITS) in ideal situations. However, in road scenarios, some factors that severely affect the performance of existing models cannot be ignored, such as uncertainties of vehicle state measurements caused by on-board sensors, time delay caused by intervehicle communications and control systems of vehicles. In this paper, a novel predictable bilateral control model (PBCM) with local wireless communication, which consists of best estimation and state prediction, is proposed to accurately control the host vehicle in traffic flow to alleviate traffic instability. Compared with other models, theoretical analysis and simulation results show that more accurate control decisions could be obtained with the PBCM, which could distribute all vehicles more evenly, and our model could maintain higher velocities when disturbances occurred. The experimental results also reveal that our proposed model could more effectively suppress traffic instability (i.e., the improvement in control decision $a$ is more than 10%) and could restore traffic balance 20% faster than other models on average. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet-of-Vehicles (IoV) is a novel technology to ensure safe and secure transportation by enabling smart vehicles to communicate and share sensitive information with each other. However, the realization of IoV in real-life depends on several factors, including the assurance of security from attackers and propagation of authentic, accurate and trusted information within the network. Further, the dissemination of compromised information must be detected and vehicle disseminating such malicious messages must be revoked from the network. To this end, trust can be integrated within the network to detect the trustworthiness of the received information. However, most of the trust models in the literature relies on evaluating node or data at the application layer. In this study, we propose a novel hybrid trust management scheme, namely, NOTRINO, which evaluates trustworthiness on the received information in two steps. First step evaluates trust on the node itself at transport layer, while second step computes trustworthiness of the data at application layer. This mechanism enables the vehicles to efficiently model and evaluate the trustworthiness on the received information. The performance and accuracy of NOTRINO is rigorously evaluated under various realistic trust evaluation criteria (including precision, recall, F-measure and trust). Furthermore, the efficiency of NOTRINO is evaluated in presence of malicious nodes and its performance is benchmarked against three hybrid trust models. Extensive simulations indicate that NOTRINO achieve over 75% trust level as compared to benchmarked trust models where trust level falls below 60% for a network with 35% malicious nodes. Similarly, 92% precision and 87% recall are achieved simultaneously with NOTRINO for the same network, comparing to benchmark trust models where precision and recall falls below 87% and 85% respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Safety at high speed is the most important performance of autonomous vehicle. Wherein, yaw stability control (YSC) is a key technology to improve vehicle safety. However, the high-speed vehicles are easy to be out of control in nonlinear region, which will result in serious accidents. This study proposes a model predictive control (MPC) method based on the Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy model to realize YSC in the nonlinear region. Firstly, a T-S fuzzy model of vehicle is established based on a two-degree-of-freedom model to describe the vehicle dynamic characteristics in the nonlinear region. Then, a robust MPC is designed and its solution is given in the linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) form. Next, a sliding mode controller (SMC) is proposed to prevent wheel lock in the YSC process. Finally, the proposed strategy is verified in simulations and experiments. The results show that the proposed strategy has similar performance in vehicle stable region with linear MPC, and shows the ability to suppress the instability of the vehicle in the nonlinear region, and its computation burden is acceptable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a model predictive current control (MPCC) method of six-phase permanent magnet synchronous hub motor (PMSHM) using auxiliary voltage vectors. First of all, 26 voltage vectors can be obtained from the switching states of six inverters, and 24 auxiliary voltage vectors can be generated by combining them. Second, four virtual voltage vectors can be found through the required locations, and the two vectors with the lowest cost will be selected by cost function. Then, additional current error correction module can better track the current. Finally, the proposed method is compared with the conventional MPCC method and another method with virtual voltage vectors. The innovation of this paper is that the recombination of vectors can better track and predict the current. A current error compensation module is added to reduce the error between the actual current and the predicted current. And the experimental results show that the proposed method has better performance such as smaller torque ripple and current THD both in steady and dynamic states. Finally, the strategy proposed in this paper was applied to the vehicle model through HIL test platform. The possibility of applying the strategy proposed in this paper to pure electric vehicles was verified under New European Driving Cycle (NEDC). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a typical traffic scenario, autonomous vehicles are required to share the road with other road participants, e.g., human driven vehicles, pedestrians, etc. To successfully navigate the traffic, an adaptive robust level-k framework can be used by the autonomous agents to categorize the agents based on their depth of strategic thought and act accordingly. However, mismatch between the vehicle dynamics and its predictions, and improper classification of the agents can lead to undesirable behavior or collision. Robust approaches can handle the uncertainties, however, might result in a conservative behavior of the autonomous vehicle. This paper proposes an adaptive robust decision making strategy for autonomous vehicles to handle model mismatches in the prediction model while utilizing the confidence of the driver behavior to obtain less conservative actions. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated for a lane change maneuver in a highway driving scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the formation control of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) is addressed considering actuator saturation and unknown nonlinear items. The algorithm can be divided into two parts, steering the leader USV to trace along the desired path and steering the follower USV to follow the leader in the desired formation. In the proposed formation control framework, a virtual USV is first constructed so that the leader USV can be guided to the desired path. To solve the input constraint problem, an auxiliary is introduced, and the adaptive fuzzy method is used to estimate unknown nonlinear items in the USV. To maintain the desired formation, the desired velocities of follower USVs are deduced using geometry and Lyapunov stability theories; the stability of the closed-loop system is also proved. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated by the simulation and experimental results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Active safety systems are of significant importance for autonomous vehicles operating in safety-critical situations like an obstacle-avoidance manoeuvre with high vehicle speed or poor road condition. However, a conventional electronic stability control system, may not always yield desired path following and yaw stability performance in such circumstances merely through brake intervention. This paper pursues a detailed investigation on utilising model predictive control (MPC) and torque vectoring for path following and yaw stability control of over-actuated autonomous electric vehicles (AEVs) in dangerous double lane change manoeuvre. The control problem of the AEV is formulated based on MPC by utilising active front steering and torque vectoring, and constraints are imposed explicitly on yaw rate and sideslip angle to ensure yaw stability. Four MPC-based controllers are designed based on double-track vehicle models. Specifically, they include two one-level controllers, i.e. one with torque vectoring and one with equal torque allocation, and two two-level controllers, i.e. one with optimisation-based torque allocation and one with rule-based allocation. These controllers are assessed extensively, with respect to passing velocity, tracking accuracy, tyre utilisation and robustness. The effect of horizon length on the control performance and computational efficiency is also investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vehicle platooning gains its popularity in improving traffic capacity, safety and fuel saving. The key requirements of an effective platooning strategy include keeping a safe inter-vehicle space, ensuring string stability and satisfying vehicular constraints. To meet these requirements, this paper proposes a distributed min-max model predictive control (MPC). One technical contribution is that the proposed MPC can guarantee input-to-state predecessor-follower string stability, in the presence of vehicle-to-vehicle communication delays and realistic constraints. Another technical contribution is the development of a new concept of input-to-state stability margin for analyzing the platooning system that is nonlinear under MPC. The proposed MPC is applicable to both homogeneous and heterogeneous platoons because only the point-mass vehicle model is needed. The proposed MPC also has reduced communication burden because each vehicle in the platoon only transmits its current acceleration to the adjacent follower. The design efficacy is verified by simulating a platoon composed of five vehicles under different uncertainties and communication delays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A microscopic fuel consumption model with respect to comprehensive fuel consumption key impact factors that can reflect dynamic engine operations and various real-world driving conditions is essential for fuel efficient model-based vehicle and powertrain control (MB-VPC). Existing microscopic fuel consumption models are mostly steady state models with limited vehicle parameters as dynamic variables. Data-driven solutions can make the model comprehensive by introducing broad impact factors. However, without the required accessible online computational capability and fast model adaptation mechanisms, those data-driven solutions cannot quickly adapt to unseen driving conditions and engine condition changes based on real-world vehicle data to support MB-VPC. In this paper, a connected vehicle-based data mining (CV-DM) framework is proposed to achieve online adaptive dynamic fuel consumption modeling through knowledge sharing over CVs and the CV remote data center. Based on the CV-DM framework, CV-supported Distributed Meta-regression (CV-DMR) algorithms are developed to realize a fast few-shot adaptation with limited training data. Extensive proof-of-concept experiments are conducted with steady-state and transient vehicle engine data. Compared to the baseline physical model and the existing non-adaptive grey-box model, prediction accuracy is improved by 47%–85% and 38%–80% respectively with only limited training data needed for the subject vehicle. Accordingly, a fuel savings of up to 9.4% can be achieved owing to the improvement of prediction accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Development of compact and easy to use mathematical models of articulated vehicles for the motion planning, control, and localization purposes becomes more and more important in the era of intelligent transportation systems, especially when there exists a need of reliable predictions of motion for multi-body (semi-)automated freight and public transportation vehicles of various kinematic structures. We propose a modular algorithmic approach to kinematic modelling of nonholonomic (multi-)articulated buses, including the N-trailer vehicles as a special case, comprising a car-like prime-mover passively interconnected with arbitrary number of segments (wagons/trailers) equipped with fixed or steerable wheels, and with various locus of a driving axle in a kinematic chain. Kinematic models are valid under an assumption of a pure rolling of all the vehicle wheels (no skid/slip motion), which is practically justified for the low-speed maneuvering conditions. The proposed approach leads to compact nonlinear models which, thanks to their modular construction, preserve clear geometrical interpretation of velocity couplings between the vehicle segments. Derivations of kinematic models for popular structures of articulated and bi-articulated urban buses are presented for various driving-axle locus and steering capabilities. Experimental model validation, conducted with a full-scale wagon-driven articulated bus, illustrates utility of the approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An optimized control approach for the distributed cooperative vehicular platoon was proposed in this paper, considering actuator delay and nonideal communication condition. A hierarchical structure is used to model the vehicular platoon, where the desired acceleration is optimized by CACC controller and the longitudinal tracking controller is proposed to follow it. In the design process of CACC controller, a parameter space approach and linear quadratic regulator (LQR) method are applied to guarantee the string stability and optimized performance. The influence of communication time delay and dropout rate is revealed by the changing of string stable region. Analytical results are verified by numerical simulations of a six-vehicle platoon where the leading vehicle follows the FTP-75 drive cycle speed profile. Furthermore, a Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) test is carried out with Carsim to simulate a high-fidelity vehicle dynamic model and dedicated short range communication (DSRC) modems as hardware in the loop as well as the control unit to achieve the inter-vehicle communication. The results show that the designed CACC platooning controller exhibits favorable performance in highway driving scenarios. The platooning vehicles display excellent car-following behavior with high accuracy, driving comfort and safety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communications using dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) are considered a promising technology for enhancing road safety. However, in V2V communications, passenger cars suffer from obstruction of bigger vehicles such as buses or trucks. Based on our measurement, a big vehicle can cause a signal loss from 10 to 15 dB due to shadowing. This results in a shorter communication range and reduces the safety message dissemination capability. In this paper, we analyze the impact of shadowing caused by multiple big vehicles on the V2V communication of passenger cars. We propose a model that takes into account both geometric and stochastic shadowing of multiple big vehicles. In order to cope with the physical size of vehicles and safety distance between them in the real world, we propose to use a repulsive point process called hardcore repulsive Poisson point process (PPP) to model the locations of vehicles. Generating procedure and some basic properties of this process are introduced. Based on the proposed model, we derive the average length of the shadow region and the shadowing loss caused by multiple big vehicles. We show that when the number of big vehicles increases from 10% to 80% of total vehicles in one lane, the shadow region increases from 50 m to 450 m on the road. Furthermore, the shadowing loss causes the relative number of cars within communication range of a typical car to reduce from 90% to between 15% and 50%, depending on whether the big vehicles are in the same or the adjacent lane of the consider car. We analyse the packet collision probability while taking into consideration the big vehicle shadow region and observe significant packet collisions without dedicated bus lanes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the distributed sensor deception attack and estimation for a class of platoon-based connected vehicles. In these systems, the information of each vehicle's position and its relative distances with respect to its neighbours plays a crucial role to achieve the desired group performance. When getting deception attacks on such important information, it will result in severe consequences including collision. In order to detect and estimate deception attacks, a longitudinal dynamic model of vehicle platoons with modelling uncertainties, measurement noises and piece-wise constant deception attacks on sensors is first presented. With the consideration of the practical issue that a local vehicle is not able to access to global information, a distributed Kalman filter is proposed to estimate the state information using local output information. Based on the residuals obtained by the distributed Kalman filter, a modified generalized likelihood ratio (GLR) algorithm is proposed to detect and estimate the sensor deception attacks. Finally, simulations with the help of standard Carsim software are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Fair comparisons between the proposed method and the standard $\chi ^2$ detector are also presented in order to provide insights for engineering practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a real-time nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) strategy for direct yaw moment control (DYC) of distributed drive electric vehicles (DDEVs). The NMPC strategy is based on a control-oriented model built by integrating a single track vehicle model with the Magic Formula (MF) tire model. To mitigate the NMPC computational cost, the continuation/generalized minimal residual (C/GMRES) algorithm is employed and modified for real-time optimization. Since the traditional C/GMRES algorithm cannot directly solve the inequality constraint problem, the external penalty method is introduced to transform inequality constraints into an equivalently unconstrained optimization problem. Based on the Pontryagin's minimum principle (PMP), the existence and uniqueness for solution of the proposed C/GMRES algorithm are proven. Additionally, to achieve fast initialization in C/GMRES algorithm, the varying predictive duration is adopted so that the analytic expressions of optimally initial solutions in C/GMRES algorithm can be derived and gained. A Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) condition based control allocation method distributes the desired traction and yaw moment among four independent motors. Numerical simulations are carried out by combining CarSim and Matlab/Simulink to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy. Results demonstrate that the real-time NMPC strategy can achieve superior vehicle stability performance, guarantee the given safety constraints, and significantly reduce the computational efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work considers the problem of position and position-uncertainty estimation for atonomous vehicles during power black-out, where it cannot be assumed that any position data is accessible. To tackle this problem, the position estimation will instead be performed using power separated and independent measurement devices, including one inertial 6 Degrees of Freedom (DOF) measurement unit, four angular wheel speed sensors and one pinion angle sensor. The measurement unit's sensors are initially characterized in order to understand conceptual limitations of the inertial navigation and also to be used in a filtering process. Measurement models are then fused together with vehicle dynamics process models using the architecture of an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). Two different EKF filter concepts are developed to estimate the vehicle position during a safe stop; one simpler filter for smooth manoeuvres and a complex filter for aggressive manoeuvres. Both filter designs are tested and evaluated with data gathered from an experimental vehicle for selected manoeuvres of developed safe-stop scenarios. The experimental results from a set of use-case manoeuvres show a trend where the size of the position estimation errors significantly grows above an initial vehicle speed of 70 km/h. This paper contributes to develop vehicle dynamics models for the purpose of a blind safe stop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been successfully applied to end-to-end autonomous driving, especially in simulation environments. However, common DRL approaches used in complex autonomous driving scenarios sometimes are unstable or difficult to converge. This paper proposes two approaches to improve the stability of the policy model training with as few manual data as possible. For the first approach, reinforcement learning is combined with imitation learning to train a feature network with a small amount of manual data for parameters initialization. For the second approach, an auxiliary network is added to the reinforcement learning framework, which can leverage the real-time measurement information to deepen the understanding of environment, without any guide of demonstrators. To verify the effectiveness of these two approaches, simulations in image information-based and lidar information-based end-to-end autonomous driving systems are conducted, respectively. These approaches are not only tested in the virtual game world, but also applied in Gazebo, in which we build a 3D world based on the real vehicle model of Ranger XP900 platform, the real 3D obstacle model, and the real motion constraints with inertial characteristics, so as to ensure that the trained end-to-end autonomous driving model is more suitable for the real world. Experimental results show that the performance is increased by over 45% in the virtual game world, and can converge quickly and stably in Gazebo in which previous methods can hardly converge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a new torque vectoring (TV) algorithm with regards to enhancing the cornering performance of the electronic-four-wheel drive (e-4WD) vehicles. The proposed TV algorithm aims to distribute the in-wheel motor (IWM) torques to the left and right wheels assisting the vehicle in following the driver's intended trajectories. The proposed TV algorithm first included a yaw rate controller reference for neutral-steering which leads to the improvement of vehicle cornering agility. Thereafter, in-vehicle sensors and a standalone global positioning system (GPS) combined with a smooth sliding mode controller (SMC) were used based on a vehicle bicycle model to generate desired yaw moment values to track the reference. Finally, a novel torque distribution algorithm using the Daisy-chaining allocation, which is suitable for redundant actuator configuration, was utilized. Noteworthy, the Daisy-chaining allocation algorithm takes into account a torque operation area with the characteristics of IWM. In this manner, based on the vehicle bicycle model and using the CARSIM interface, the simulations, evaluation and verifications of the proposed control technique were done. Thereafter, considering a real-car based experiments with various driving scenarios, the effectiveness of the proposed TV algorithm was evaluated. It was confirmed that some evaluation factors in terms of the cornering performance were improved. The following main contributions makes the proposed TV algorithm be a meaningful solution to enhance the cornering performance of e-4WD vehicles: 1) improvement of both smoothness and convergence rate of control action, 2) a practical and intuitive way to distribute IWM torques, and 3) high applicability to mass-produced vehicles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) technique enhances the coordination of vehicles on road. Through CACC controllers, the platoon can exhibit promising traffic performance. In this paper, we study the control synthesis for two types of CACC systems, one of which uses acceleration feedforward while the other uses control feedforward. Under the predecessor-following topology, a general state-space model of vehicle platoon is established and the CACC characteristics including stabilization and string stability are realized by a set of constraints. To relax computation, complete quadratic Lyapunov-Krasovskii functionals are adopted and the CACC controllers are solved by linear matrix inequality tools. The proposed method provides a computationally efficient way to realize CACC design, and comparative experiments with existing work demonstrate the advantages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motion prediction for the leading vehicle is a critical task for connected autonomous vehicles. It provides a method to model the leading-following vehicle behavior and analysis their interactions. In this study, a joint time-series modeling approach for leading vehicle trajectory prediction considering different driving styles is proposed. The proposed method enables a precise and personalized trajectory prediction for the leading vehicle based on limited inter-vehicle communication signals, such as the vehicle speed and acceleration of the front vehicles. Three different driving styles are first recognized based on an unsupervised clustering algorithm, namely, Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). The GMM generates a specific driving style for each vehicle based on the speed, acceleration, jerk, time, and space headway features of the leading vehicle. The feature importance of driving style recognition is also evaluated based on the Maximal Information Coefficient (MIC) algorithm. Then, a personalized joint time series modeling (JTSM) method based on the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Recurrent Neural Network model (RNN) is proposed to predict the front vehicle trajectories. The JTSM contains a common LSTM layer and different fully connected regression layers for different driving styles. The proposed method is tested with the Next Generation Simulation (NGSIM) data on the US101, and I-80 highway dataset. The JTSM is tested for making predictions one to five seconds ahead. Results indicate that the proposed personalized JTSM approach shows a significant advantage over the baseline algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In vehicle dynamics, yaw rate control is used to improve the cornering response in steady-state and transient conditions. This can be achieved through an appropriate anti-roll moment distribution between the front and rear axles of a vehicle with controllable suspension actuators. Such control action alters the load transfer distribution, which in turn provokes a lateral tire force variation. With respect to the extensive set of papers from the literature discussing yaw rate tracking through active suspension control, this study presents: i) A detailed analysis of the effect of the load transfer on the lateral axle force and cornering stiffness; ii) A novel linearized single-track vehicle model formulation for control system design, based on the results in i); and iii) An optimization-based routine for the design of the non-linear feedforward contribution of the control action. The resulting feedforward-feedback controller is assessed through: a) Simulations with an experimentally validated model of a vehicle with active anti-roll bars (case study 1); and b) Experimental tests on a vehicle prototype with an active suspension system (case study 2). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The driving range of electric vehicles is a complex issue. In simulation, this range is determined by coupling a battery model and a traction model of the vehicle. But most of the battery models used for such studies do not take into account the interaction between the temperature of the battery (impacting its electrical parameters) and the traction model of a studied EV. In this paper, a battery electro-thermal model (with all electrical parameters dependent upon the temperature) is dynamically coupled with the traction model of an electric vehicle. Simulation results are provided to show the impact of the temperature on the driving range. The initial battery model (without temperature dependence) leads to an overestimation of the driving range of 3.3% at −5 °C and an underestimation of 2.5% at 40 °C. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the trajectory tracking control problem for autonomous underwater vehicles whose initial starting position differs substantially from that specified by the desired trajectory. This scenario is very likely to cause serious chattering in the control output, especially in the early stages, when the large tracking error is the input to the controller. A novel trajectory tracking control strategy is developed based on fuzzy re-planning of a local desired trajectory. At each time instant, a local desired trajectory is reconstructed based on the AUV's current position and that specified by the original desired trajectory at a future time. Also the control effort is computed based on the local desired trajectory, rather than the original one. Moreover, the interval between each time instant is determined by a new single-input fuzzy model, where the input is determined by the distance between AUV's current and desired trajectories and the change in the distance. Finally, the effectiveness of the new control strategy is verified by simulation-based case studies using an actual vehicle model as a necessary step prior to experimental validation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an integrated platoon control framework for heterogeneous vehicles on curved roads with varying slopes, aerodynamic drag, and wireless communication delays. First, a linear heterogeneous vehicle platoon model with decoupled longitudinal and lateral dynamics is built based on nonlinear feedback linearization and arc-length parametric transformation of an arbitrary curved road. The external disturbances are also considered, including the up-down road slopes, wind and equivalent time-delays caused by the wireless communication delay and discrete data in onboard sensors. Second, to achieve stable platoon control on a curved road, the platoon uses the state-feedback control method in the longitudinal direction while each vehicle tracks the centerline of the curved road to realize lateral control. Longitudinally, an $ H_\infty$ platoon controller is designed based on the Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional to ensure the inner-vehicle and string stability of the platoon, which suffers from parameter uncertainty, and external disturbances. Additionally, the $ \mathcal {L}_2$ string stability is defined to guarantee that the perturbations do not grow unbounded as they propagate through the platoon. Simulation results indicate that the proposed robust controller achieves proper platoon intervehicle spacing in both the longitudinal and lateral directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies a control architecture for vehicle lateral dynamics based on the execution of optimal trajectories via feedforward inverse model control. The focus here is on assessing the robustness of this arrangement when the vehicle real forward dynamics is not identically cancelled by the inverse model due to model approximations and parameter uncertainties. The trajectories that are considered are analytic solutions of the minimum square jerk optimal control problem for a simplified kinematic vehicle model in curvilinear coordinates. Various hypotheses are made concerning the mismatch between the inverse model and the actual forward dynamics of the vehicle. Closed-loop stability analysis shows that the studied control scheme guarantees asymptotic stability of both the nominal and the perturbed kinematic model with significant robustness margins. In addition to the theoretical robustness analysis, the same control scheme is validated in simulation using the industry-standard software for virtual vehicle testing IPG CarMaker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The platoon control for vehicles can efficiently reduce traffic pressure. Current control schemes are able to achieve stable platoon control, but cannot guarantee collision avoidance, connectivity preservation and convergence time at the same time. In this paper, we propose a novel control scheme that can simultaneously guarantee the safe distance and communication connectivity, which is called flexible safe distance constraint, and also can guarantee the specified convergence time. A dynamic gain based distributed control law is first designed for the vehicle with single-integral model. Using the prescribed transient and steady-state performance control approach, the flexible safe distance constraint can be satisfied. Using the time transformation method and Lyapunov stability theory, the closed-loop systems under the proposed protocols can achieve stable platoon within the specified time. Compared with some existing results, the novelty of this work is that the proposed approaches allow a vehicle to converge with the platoon within any preset time without dependence on the initial conditions or system parameters. Another contribution of this work is to propose specified-time platoon control protocols for the vehicle with double-integral model under a flexible safe distance constraint. Furthermore, in order to get closer to the actual system, the controller is extended to the triple-integral system, and some special cases are also discussed. Finally, some simulations are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a robust gain-scheduling controller design based on the parameter-space approach. The gain-scheduling control is of interest for systems with varying dynamics at different operating conditions. Requirements of robustness of stability and performance are also necessary if the system is subject to other parametric or model uncertainties. The parameter space approach is capable of projecting these requirements to the space of design parameters and facilitate the design of robust gain-scheduling control. This method is applied to automated vehicle lateral control to ensure its tracking accuracy and stability subject to uncertainties in vehicle load, speed and tire saturation. The proportional feedback gain and look-ahead distance are scheduled with respect to speed while sustaining robust stability, mixed sensitivity bound constraint and satisfaction of performance indices. Realistic hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation with a validated vehicle model and road tests are conducted to demonstrate the robust performance of the designed gain-scheduling control in the presence of model uncertainty and disturbances. Another general robust gain-scheduling approach, the linear-matrix-inequality- (LMI-) design is also conducted for benchmarking purposes and the comparisons are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study deals with a new integrated control sys-tem using active torque vectoring (ATV) and electronic stability control (ESC) for enhancement of vehicle directional stability and steerability. In this system, the stabilizing yaw moment is calculated using a novel constrained nonlinear controller with both input and state constraints. The proposed controller is designed using the prediction of continuous nonlinear vehicle model. It guarantees the vehicle directional stability by restricting the side slip angle in the admissible range when the yaw rate tracks its desired response for improved steerability. The calculated yaw moment is generated as driving and braking forces by integrated ATV and ESC systems. According to the integration policy, the required yaw moment is initially generated by ATV in the rear wheels to keep the vehicle driving performance. Because of limitation of ATV, if more yaw moment is required, the ESC system applies asymmetric braking pressure to front wheels to compensate the scarcity of ATV. By the proposed strategy, the small reduction of vehicle velocity is achieved and the vehicle drivability performance is maintained. In order to determine the full capacity of ATV, the active differential dynamics is considered in this paper. Simulation studies are conducted to evaluate the efficiency of proposed constrained controller in comparing with the unconstrained controller and a conventional nonlinear model predictive controller (NMPC) developed in the recent papers using 14-DOF vehicle model. By analyzing the results, it is clear that the proposed controller is much faster and easy to solution and implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vehicle re-identification (Re-ID) plays an important role in intelligent transportation systems. It usually suffers from various challenges encountered on the real-life environments, such as viewpoint variations, illumination changes, object occlusions, and other complicated scenarios. To effectively improve the vehicle Re-ID performance, a new method, called the deep quadruplet appearance learning (DQAL), is proposed in this paper. The novelty of the proposed DQAL lies on the consideration of the special difficulty in vehicle Re-ID that the vehicles with the same model and color but different identities (IDs) are highly similar to each other. For that, the proposed DQAL designs the concept of quadruplet and forms the quadruplets as the input, where each quadruplet is composed of the anchor (or target), positive, negative, and the specially considered high-similar (i.e., the same model and color but different IDs with respect to the anchor) vehicle samples. Then, the quadruplet network with the incorporation of the proposed quadruplet loss and softmax loss is developed to learn a more discriminative feature for vehicle Re-ID, especially discerning those difficult high-similar cases. Extensive experiments conducted on two commonly used datasets VeRi-776 and VehicleID have demonstrated that the proposed DQAL approach outperforms multiple recently reported vehicle Re-ID methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, an adaptive steering robust nonlinear control method based on driver behavior is presented for an unmanned driving robotic vehicle (UDRV), in order to achieve accurate and stable steering control of UDRV. Considering modeling uncertainties and unknown nonlinear external disturbances, a UDRV nonlinear dynamics model is established. A driver behavior model is established considering a coordinate transformation model, a driver virtual path planning model, and a driver desired yaw rate model. On the basis of this, an adaptive steering robust nonlinear controller for UDRV is presented, consisting of an adaptive robust backstepping controller and a nonlinear disturbance observer (NDO). The NDO is designed to compensate for modeling uncertainties and unknown nonlinear external disturbances. The adaptive steering robust nonlinear controller for UDRV is designed through backstepping method and NDO compensation. The stability of control system is proved. Finally, double lane change experiments are conducted. Comparison analysis results among the proposed control method, other existed control method, and human driver demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Steer-by-wire (SBW) systems provide significant benefits to classical vehicles, and are indispensable for fully autonomous vehicles (AVs). A backup (emergency) strategy is needed to steer an AV equipped with SBW to safety if its steering actuator fails completely. Differential drive assisted steering (DDAS), which uses torque vectoring(TV) to steer a vehicle in the absence of a steering actuator, has been proposed as a backup strategy for SBW systems. However, vehicle stability control (VSC) – a required feature in most modern vehicles – also relies on TV to assist vehicles in maintaining stability. In this paper, it is shown through stability analyses on a linearized vehicle model that VSC enhances the stability of an AV equipped with a fully functional SBW system. Conversely, when combined with DDAS as a backup steering strategy for a failed SBW system, VSC typically deteriorates stability. Thus, the benefits of VSC in ensuring stability cannot be taken for granted for AVs, e.g., by designing it as a decoupled controller added on to DDAS. Instead, VSC and DDAS must be designed in an integrated manner to guarantee stability. To support this finding, simulations are conducted where a nonlinear AV model with either SBW or DDAS – both combined with VSC and implemented via model predictive control – are used to carry out an ISO-standard double lane change test at 80 km/h. Using the SBW system, the AV passes the test, both with VSC decoupled from and integrated with the SBW system. However, in the case of SBW failure, the AV with VSC decoupled from DDAS fails the test, while that with VSC integrated with DDAS completes the test successfully. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robust estimation of vehicle sideslip angle is essential for stability control applications. However, the direct measurement of sideslip angle is expensive for production vehicles. This paper presents a novel sideslip estimation algorithm which relies only on sensors available on passenger and commercial vehicles. The proposed method uses both kinematics and dynamics vehicle models to construct extended Kalman filter observers. The estimate relies on the results provided from the dynamics model observer where the tire cornering stiffness parameters are updated using the information provided from the kinematics model observer. The stability property of the proposed algorithm is discussed and proven. Finally, multiple experimental tests are conducted to verify its performance in practice. The results show that the proposed approach provides smooth and accurate sideslip angle estimation. In addition, our novel algorithm provides reliable estimates of bank angles and lateral acceleration sensor bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a novel approach is presented to solve the trajectory tracking problem for autonomous vehicles. This approach is based on the use of a cascade control where the external loop solves the position control using a novel Takagi Sugeno‐Model Predictive Control (TS-MPC) approach and the internal loop is in charge of the dynamic control of the vehicle using a Takagi Sugeno‐Linear Quadratic Regulator technique designed via Linear Matrix Inequalities (TS-LMI-LQR). Both techniques use a TS representation of the kinematic and dynamic models of the vehicle. In addition, a novel Takagi–Sugeno estimator‐Moving Horizon Estimator‐Unknown Input Observer (TS-MHE-UIO) is presented. This method estimates the dynamic states of the vehicle optimally as well as the force of friction acting on the vehicle that is used to reduce the control efforts. The innovative contribution of the TS-MPC and TS-MHE-UIO techniques is that using the TS model formulation of the vehicle allows us to solve the nonlinear problem as if it were linear, reducing computation times by 10–20 times. To demonstrate the potential of the TS-MPC, we propose a comparison between three methods of solving the kinematic control problem: Using the nonlinear MPC formulation (NL-MPC) with compensated friction force, the TS-MPC approach with compensated friction force, and TS-MPC without compensated friction force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the strong nonlinearity, coupling characteristics, external disturbance, and complex driving conditions, it is difficult to establish an accurate mathematical model for the autonomous ground vehicle (AGV). This requires the AGV path following controller to have strong robustness. In this paper, a robust AGV path following control strategy that is based on nonsingular terminal sliding mode (NTSM) and active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) is presented. First, the complex path following problem is simplified to a simple yaw angle tracking problem by constructing a desired yaw angle function that satisfies that the displacement deviation of AGV converges to zero when the actual yaw angle approaches the desired yaw angle. Second, an NTSM-ADRC controller is designed for the system, which uses the extended state observer to estimate and compensate the unmodeled dynamics and unknown external perturbations of the system in real time. In order to improve response characteristics of the controller, the nonlinear error feedback control law is designed by combining the NTSM and exponential approximation law. In contrast to the existing work, the improved controller can use the simple two-degree-of-freedom linear vehicle dynamic model to provide good performance in a range of driving conditions. Finally, the CarSim–Simulink simulation results of typical conditions show that the proposed control strategy can make the AGV follow the reference path quickly and accurately while ensuring the stability of the vehicle and has strong robustness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]