Search Results

In the field of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) the capability to accurately estimate and predict the driving behavior of surrounding traffic participants has shown to enable significant improvements of the respective ADAS in terms of economy and comfort. The interaction between the different participants can be an important aspect. One example for this interaction is the car following behavior in dense urban traffic situations. There are different phenomenological or psychological models of human car following which also consider variations between different participants. Unfortunately, these models can seldom be applied for control directly or prediction in vehicle applications. A different way is to follow a control oriented approach by modeling the human as a time delay controller which tracks the inter-vehicle distance. The parameters are typically chosen based on empirical rules and do not consider variations between drivers.

Virtual testing of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) using a simulation environment provides great potential in reducing real world testing and therefore currently much effort is spent on the development of such tools. This work proposes a simulation and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) framework, which helps to create a virtual test environment for ADAS based on real world test drive. The idea is to reproduce environmental conditions obtained on a test drive within a simulation environment. For this purpose, a production standard BMW 320d is equipped with a radar sensor to capture surrounding traffic objects and used as vehicle for test drives. Post processing of recorded GPS raw data from the navigation system using an open source map service and the radar data allows an exact reproduction of the driven road including other traffic participants.

Abatement and control of emissions from passenger car combustion engines have been in the focus for a long time. Nevertheless, to address upcoming real-world driving emission targets, knowledge of current engine emissions is crucial. Still, adequate sensors for transient emissions are seldom available in production engines. One way to target this issue is by applying virtual sensors which utilize available sensor information in an engine control unit (ECU) and provide estimates of the not measured emissions. For real-world application it is important that the virtual sensor has low complexity and works under varying conditions. Naturally, the choice of suitable inputs from all available candidates will have a strong impact on these factors. In this work a method to set up virtual sensors by means of design of experiments (DOE) and iterative identification of polynomial models is augmented with a novel input candidate selection strategy.

Modern cars feature a variety of different driving assistance systems, which aim to improve driving comfort and safety as well as fuel consumption. Due to the technical advances and the possibility to consider vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication, cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) strategies have received significant attention from both research and industrial communities. The performance of such systems can be enhanced if the future velocity of the surrounding traffic can be predicted. Generally, human driving behavior is a complex process and influenced by several environmental impacts. In this work a stochastic model of the velocity of a preceding vehicle based on the incorporation of available information sources such as V2I, V2V and radar information is presented. The main influences on the velocity prediction considered in this approach are current and previous velocity measurements and traffic light signals.

Adaptive cruise control (ACC) systems allow a safe and reliable driving by adapting the velocity of the vehicle to velocity setpoints and the distance from preceding vehicles. This substantially reduces the effort of the driver especially in heavy traffic conditions. However, standard ACC systems do not necessarily take in account comfort and fuel efficiency. Recently some work has been done of the latter aspect. This paper extends previous works for CI engines by incorporating a prediction model of the surrounding traffic and a simplified control law capable for real time use in experiments. The prediction model itself uses sinusoidal functions as the traffic measurements often show periodic behavior and is adapted in every sample instant with respect to the predecessor's velocity. Furthermore, the controlled vehicle is forced to stay within a specific inter-vehicle distance corridor to avoid collisions and ensure safe driving.

Advanced driver assistance systems like cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) are designed to exploit information provided by vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and/or infrastructure-to-vehicle (I2V) communication systems to achieve desired objectives such as safety, traffic fluidity or fuel economy. In a day to day traffic scenario, the presence of unknown disturbances complicates achieving these objectives. In particular, CACC benefits in terms of fuel economy require the prediction of the behavior of a preceding vehicle during a finite time horizon. This paper suggests an estimation method based on actual and past inter-vehicle distance data as well as on traffic and upcoming traffic lights. This information is used to train a set of nonlinear, autoregressive (NARX) models. Two scenarios are investigated, one of them assumes a V2V communication with the predecessor, the other uses only data acquired by on-board vehicle sensors.