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In this article, a decentralized strategy is applied for active control of sound inside the automobile cabin by considering the uncertainty caused by the movement of the occupants. A coupled structural-acoustic analysis is done on the simplified geometry of the automobile cabin with passengers by the finite element method. The uncertainty caused by changes in the occupants' head positions and angles is also considered. Then, a decentralized robust feedback control strategy is proposed to reduce the sound pressure level in the ears of all the occupants using the H∞ method for each individual control unit by considering the unstructured uncertainty of the plant. The efficiency of the proposed control strategy in minimizing the sound pressure level caused by the structural disturbance on the firewall panel is investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study proposes a drowsiness detection approach based on the combination of several different detection methods, with robustness to the input signal loss. Hence, if one of the methods fails for any reason, the whole system continues to work properly. To choose correct combination of the available methods and to utilize the benefits of methods of different categories, an image processing-based technique as well as a method based on driver-vehicle interaction is used. In order to avoid driving distraction, any use of an intrusive method is prevented. A driving simulator is used to gather real data and then artificial neural networks are used in the structure of the designed system. Several tests were conducted on twelve volunteers while their sleeping situations during one day prior to the tests, were fully under control. Although the impact of the proposed system on the improvement of the detection accuracy is not remarkable, the results indicate the main advantages of the system are the reliability of the detections and robustness to the loss of the input signals. The high reliability of the drowsiness detection systems plays an important role to reduce drowsiness related road accidents and their associated costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of controlling a string of vehicles moving in one dimension is considered so that they all follow a lead vehicle with constant spacing between successive vehicles. Due to practical design and implementation, the negative effect of the tracking lag parameter is taken into account. A hierarchical platoon controller design framework is established comprising a feedback linearization controller at the first layer and a decentralized bidirectional control controller at the second layer. The stability criterion is examined by using a partial differential equation approximation in the limit of the number of vehicles subjected to unequal asymmetry in position and velocity feedback. For disturbance attenuation, string stability analysis is also examined. At the end of the paper, simulations are given to show the efficiency of the proposed results. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]