Keywords: Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, Obstacle Detection and Avoidance, Path Planning
Abstract: Motion planning and control are crucial components for automated vehicles. Especially in parking scenarios, high precision is required due to the small distances to obstacles. Common approaches utilize ultrasonic or camera sensors. This paper presents a radar-based system architecture for automated parking, which can operate more robustly under diffcult weather conditions. Moreover, this work develops a unified planning and control framework based on nonlinear model predictive control. Real vehicles often exhibit dynamic behavior that the commonly used kinematic bicycle model does not represent. Therefore, the paper at hand proposes an extended model, which rests upon a systematic analysis of the test vehicle's dynamics for the low-velocity range. Experiments in simulation and on real-world data show the efficiency of the approach and the importance of the extended vehicle dynamics modeling for closed-loop control.

Keywords: Sensor Fusion and Sensor Systems, Integration of Sensors, Advanced Driver Assistance Systems
Abstract: With recent advances in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), autonomous driving has increased the need for reliable perception techniques. To achieve reliability, automotive sensors are being applied to autonomous driving vehicles, such as cameras, LiDAR, and radars. Various methods for fusing sensors have been studied to increase performance. In this study, we propose a centralized multi-sensor tracker, which is a first attempt to take advantage of fusing heterogeneous onboard sensors while accounting for data uncertainties. The proposed approach uses a Random Finite Set based Poisson Multi-Bernoulli Mixture filter. Experimental results from an actual vehicle dataset show that the proposed method tracks accurately even when objects are occluded or overlapped. It demonstrates the capability of tracking objects for autonomous driving in an urban environment.

Keywords: Fault Detection, Diagnosis, Tolerance and Removal, Motion Estimation, Sensor Fusion and Sensor Systems
Abstract: The paper first extends the previous work of the authors dealing with optical flow-based angular rate estimation. Extension means consideration of camera position and orientation relative to the UAV body system (non-aligned camera). After the extension the proposed method is evaluated with virtual reality (Unreal-Carla) image sequences considering simulated aircraft flight trajectories and different frames per second (fps) rates. Based-on the results showing high fps requirements for agile flight scenarios a reversed method is proposed for angular rate sensor fault detection considering the integration of system dynamics based-on angular rate and velocity measurements and comparing the predicted image feature positions with the measured ones. The feature position differences are the error measures completed with up-down counters. The results are promising however, only basic evaluation of the proposed methods is done paving the way for detailed evaluation and development outlined in the conclusion.

Keywords: Decision Support Systems, Fault Detection, Diagnosis, Tolerance and Removal
Abstract: Obsolescence and its consequences are becoming a common phenomenon in our daily lives. Obsolescence seems to be inevitable and businesses and consumers must learn to deal with it. The current and real transition to electric vehicles promises a dramatic impact of obsolescence on the automotive industry, especially due to the dependence on large numbers of electronic components. Among other sectors, the automotive industry is facing and will increasingly face obsolescence in the coming years and decades, mainly due to the massive introduction of electronic devices and distributed computer programs in almost all major functions of cars, such as infotainment, engine control or safety. Nevertheless, by browsing through the literature, we have discovered that the problems related to obsolescence are not studied in depth in view of the future (r)evolutions of the car industry. The aim of this document is to draw the attention of the scientific community to this subject by first presenting a documented reminder of what obsolescence is, and then an analysis of today’s practices of its management in the automotive sector. Although studied for the automotive sector, the proposed lines of analysis remain generic and useful for the development of methodological approaches to proactive and strategic management of obsolescence for other industrial sectors, whether mass, batch or one- off production.

Keywords: Telecontrol, Teleoperation and Telerobotics, Intelligent Control, Human-Vehicle Interaction
Abstract: Contemporary implementations of robotized systems concern ever more and more frequently autonomous robots. However, especially when operating in an unknown and dynamic environment, the mobile agent may be faced with a situation when its control system is unable to find the right solution to resolve the problem, which may result in getting stuck and breaking the mission. One of the possible solutions to this situation may be the implementation of Virtual Teleportation (VT) technology. Its idea consists in taking over the control by the remote operator, who thanks to the innovative interface has the feeling as if he/she would immerse into the operating scene of the robotic system that facilitates him/her controlling the system and allows to solve the problem too difficult to cope by the control system of the robotic agent by its own. Then the control is handed over to the autonomous system that continues the mission on its own. The paper deals with general issues concerning autonomy aided by VT. Moreover, examples of the applications of the new idea of control are given.

Keywords: Intelligent Transportation Systems, Human-Vehicle Interaction, Advanced Driver Assistance Systems
Abstract: This paper presents a new shared lateral control approach to deal with the transition management between the human driver and the autonomous system. The objective of this shared control is to realize a smooth and safe switching between the two agents steering inputs during a lane keeping maneuver. The different driving modes including the transition system are detailed. Two transition modes are defined. The human driver acts on the vehicle's lateral control. The autonomous system consists of longitudinal and lateral controller developed based on Super Twisting Sliding Mode (STSM) control approach. Then, the control authority allocation is performed using the mixing shared control that permits the fusion of two inputs via a fusion parameter. To do that, a coordinator based on a decision algorithm is developed for the driving modes and the fusion parameter determination. Finally, validation of the proposed shared control is done on the SCANeR Studio (OKtal) professional simulator with the human in-the-loop through the Logitech G29 steering wheel for two different scenarios.

Keywords: Path Planning, Multi-Vehicle Systems, Navigation Systems
Abstract: Most of the studies found in the literature for autonomous driving solutions applied to vehicles convoying are related to highway platooning applications. However, in recent years both the agriculture and military fields seem to have an increased interest in such solutions for off-road applications. This work presents a corridor-based strategy for motion planning of automated vehicles convoys in off-road environments. From the wake generated by the leading vehicle, the follower vehicle estimates the boundaries of a navigable corridor encompassing the leader’s path. Using these boundaries and the outputs from the on-board navigation subsystem, the vehicle plans the most suitable trajectory to follow the leader while avoiding obstacles. In order to keep the vehicles within safety distance thresholds, an inter-distance model is applied to the speed profile generation. The proposed strategy has been implemented and validated with real vehicles, showing promising results in fully operational off-road environments.

Keywords: Communication Control Application and Systems, Marine Systems, Robot Navigation, Programming and Vision
Abstract: To enable high computational loads for low cost underwater drones, a cloud based architecture is proposed to take advantage of recent development in machine learning and computer vision. The processing power made available will benefit vehicles with limited onboard processing capacity. The rapid development of cloud computing services have made servers with significant computational resources easier to access. In this paper, a communication interface for cloud based multilayer architecture is proposed to enable real time performance by distributing the workload to networked processing devices. It adopts a publish-subscribe model for efficient communication between the layers. The latency and workload distribution are evaluated to assess the efficiency of the proposed method. An application to semantic segmentation of under-water scenes is also tested to measure the framework capabilities for real-time operation using more resource-demanding tools. The conducted experiments resulted in time and performance gains through offloading the underwater vehicle, and forwarding the computations to the cloud based layer.

Keywords: Controller Design, Controller Modelling, Advanced Driver Assistance Systems
Abstract: This paper develops a speed controller for a rear-drive electric vehicle. A Barrier Incremental Backstepping strategy is proposed for tracking the desired speed, aiming to increase the robustness of the controller and avoid loss of traction due to excessive longitudinal slip. The solution is evaluated in simulation for different scenarios, showing satisfactory results inconstraining the tire slip.

Keywords: Controller Design, Controller Modelling, Control Systems and Technology
Abstract: The improvement of driving comfort and vehicle stability performance is essential for the vehicles, which can be actualized by adaptive semi-active suspension control. Cloud computing allows several features for autonomous vehicles. Implementing the adaptive suspension control using historical road data gathered in the cloud database is one of these features. This paper deals with the adaptive semi-active suspension control from the perspective of a Vehicle-to-Cloud-to-Vehicle integration. Measured and historical performance(vertical acceleration and tire deformation) and velocity data in different locations and road irregularities from other vehicles have been stored in the cloud database and used to design the dedicated scheduling variable. The novelty of this paper is developing the adaptive semi-active suspension control method with different scheduling parameter design approaches based on cloud application for the road adaptation capabilities of the suspension system. The control architecture is founded on the Linear Parameter-Varying framework, where the scheduling variable allows the trade-off between driving comfort and vehicle stability. The real data simulation demonstrates the operation of the introduced method in the TruckSim simulation environment and Matlab/Simulink. The results show that both vehicle stability and driving comfort has been improved.

Keywords: Control Systems and Technology, Robot Control Dynamics and Kinematics, Intelligent Transportation Systems
Abstract: This study highlights a combined center of gravity (CG) approach to model the comprehensive dynamics of the ground vehicles with articulated steering using solely six degrees of freedom (6-DOF). It is the case with an articulated vehicle that its CG shifts laterally towards the center of rotation during a turn. Thus, the idea is to compute the combined CG position of the multi-body articulated vehicle, which leads to the correction of the moment arms and body inertias about the updated CG position in the dynamic equations. Hence, the body forces and moments are computed with respect to the corrected CG position. In addition, the paper illustrates mathematical modeling of the center-articulated steering mechanism for the ground vehicle while restricting its operation to the primary handling regime. Overall, the draft presents the design of a nonlinear 6-DOF simulation for a load-haul-dump (LHD) type of articulated vehicle with a traveling CG. The simulation data is presented from one simulation run, where the critical results are analyzed. The obtained results signify the simplicity in using a combined CG to represent the vehicle dynamics.

Keywords: Intelligent Control, Aircraft Control, Control Systems and Technology
Abstract: In this paper, we tackle the problem of PID Control tuning for a quadrotor. This task is vital given the several applications a UAV quadrotor can perform. This paper focuses on the optimal PID controller tuning in phi axes. We propose using a Multi-objective Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm for PID performance improvement. The proposed system is evaluated in a Parrot Mambo FPV UAV Quadrotor virtual model using MATLAB & Simulink environment. We compare four different cost functions for the multi-objective optimization approach. Those cost functions focus on improving the UAV performance based on the settling time, overshoot, steady-state error, and control effort. The evaluation system shows the best performance in combining the different factors through the Multi-objective PSO algorithm.