Trajectory tracking control is a key technology in the research and development of autonomous vehicles. With the aim of addressing problems such as low control accuracy and poor real-time performance, which can occur easily when an autonomous vehicle avoids obstacles, this research focuses on the trajectory tracking control algorithm for autonomous vehicle considering cornering characteristics. First, the vehicle dynamics model and tire model are established through appropriate simplification. Then, based on the basic principle of model predictive control, a linear time-varying model predictive controller (LTV MPC) that considers the cornering characteristics is designed and optimized. Finally, using CarSim and MATLAB/Simulink software, a joint simulation model is established and the trajectory tracking performance of the controlled vehicle under different vehicle speeds and road adhesion conditions are tested through simulation experiments in combination with the double-shift line reference trajectory. The simulation results show the LTV MPC controller that considers cornering characteristics has good self-adaptability under complicated and severe working conditions, and no cases, such as car sideslip or track departure, were observed. Compared with other controllers and algorithms, the designed trajectory tracking controller has remarkable comprehensive performance, exhibits superior robustness and anti-interference ability, and significant improvements in the trajectory tracking control accuracy and real-time performance. The proposed control algorithm is of great importance in improving the tracking stability and driving safety of autonomous vehicles under complex extreme conditions and conducive to the further development and improvement of the technological level of intelligent vehicle driving assistance.

Vehicle detection is an indispensable part of environmental perception technology for smart cars. Aiming at the issues that conventional vehicle detection can be easily restricted by environmental conditions and cannot have accuracy and real-time performance, this article proposes a front vehicle detection algorithm for smart car based on improved SSD model. Single shot multibox detector (SSD) is one of the current mainstream object detection frameworks based on deep learning. This work first briefly introduces the SSD network model and analyzes and summarizes its problems and shortcomings in vehicle detection. Then, targeted improvements are performed to the SSD network model, including major advancements to the basic structure of the SSD model, the use of weighted mask in network training, and enhancement to the loss function. Finally, vehicle detection experiments are carried out on the basis of the KITTI vision benchmark suite and self-made vehicle dataset to observe the algorithm performance in different complicated environments and weather conditions. The test results based on the KITTI dataset show that the mAP value reaches 92.18%, and the average processing time per frame is 15 ms. Compared with the existing deep learning-based detection methods, the proposed algorithm can obtain accuracy and real-time performance simultaneously. Meanwhile, the algorithm has excellent robustness and environmental adaptability for complicated traffic environments and anti-jamming capabilities for bad weather conditions. These factors are of great significance to ensure the accurate and efficient operation of smart cars in real traffic scenarios and are beneficial to vastly reduce the incidence of traffic accidents and fully protect people’s lives and property.

An accurate state-of-charge (SOC) can not only provide a safe and reliable guarantee for the entirety of equipment but also extend the service life of the battery pack. Given that the chemical reaction inside the lithium-ion battery is a highly nonlinear dynamic system, obtaining an accurate SOC for the battery management system is very challenging. This paper proposed a gated recurrent unit recurrent neural network model with activation function layers (GRU-ATL) to estimate battery SOC. The model used deep learning technology to establish the nonlinear relationship between current, voltage, and temperature measurement signals and battery SOC. Then the online SOC estimation was carried out on different testing sets using the trained model. The experiments in this paper showed that the GRU-ATL network model could realize online SOC estimation under different working conditions without relying on an accurate battery model. Compared with the gated recurrent unit recurrent neural (GRU) network model and long short-term memory (LSTM) network model, the GRU-ATL network model had more stable and accurate SOC prediction performance. When the measurement data contained noise, the experimental results showed that the SOC prediction accuracy of GRU-ATL model was 0.1–0.4% higher than the GRU model and 0.3–0.7% higher than the LSTM model. The mean absolute error (MAE) of SOC predicted by the GRU-ATL model was stable in the range of 0.7–1.4%, and root mean square error (RMSE) was stable between 1.2–1.9%. The model still had high prediction accuracy and robustness, which could meet the SOC estimation in complex vehicle working conditions.

Pedestrian detection is an important aspect of the development of intelligent vehicles. To address problems in which traditional pedestrian detection is susceptible to environmental factors and are unable to meet the requirements of accuracy in real time, this study proposes a pedestrian detection algorithm for intelligent vehicles in complex scenarios. YOLOv3 is one of the deep learning-based object detection algorithms with good performance at present. In this article, the basic principle of YOLOv3 is elaborated and analyzed firstly to determine its limitations in pedestrian detection. Then, on the basis of the original YOLOv3 network model, many improvements are made, including modifying grid cell size, adopting improved k-means clustering algorithm, improving multi-scale bounding box prediction based on receptive field, and using Soft-NMS algorithm. Finally, based on INRIA person and PASCAL VOC 2012 datasets, pedestrian detection experiments are conducted to test the performance of the algorithm in various complex scenarios. The experimental results show that the mean Average Precision (mAP) value reaches 90.42%, and the average processing time of each frame is 9.6 ms. Compared with other detection algorithms, the proposed algorithm exhibits accuracy and real-time performance together, good robustness and anti-interference ability in complex scenarios, strong generalization ability, high network stability, and detection accuracy and detection speed have been markedly improved. Such improvements are significant in protecting the road safety of pedestrians and reducing traffic accidents, and are conducive to ensuring the steady development of the technological level of intelligent vehicle driving assistance.

An accurate state of charge (SOC) can provide effective judgment for the BMS, which is conducive for prolonging battery life and protecting the working state of the entire battery pack. In this study, the first-order RC battery model is used as the research object and two parameter identification methods based on the least square method (RLS) are analyzed and discussed in detail. The simulation results show that the model parameters identified under the Federal Urban Driving Schedule (HPPC) condition are not suitable for the Federal Urban Driving Schedule (FUDS) condition. The parameters of the model are not universal through the HPPC condition. A multitimescale prediction model is also proposed to estimate the SOC of the battery. That is, the extended Kalman filter (EKF) is adopted to update the model parameters and the adaptive unscented Kalman filter (AUKF) is used to predict the battery SOC. The experimental results at different temperatures show that the EKF-AUKF method is superior to other methods. The algorithm is simulated and verified under different initial SOC errors. In the whole FUDS operating condition, the RSME of the SOC is within 1%, and that of the voltage is within 0.01 V. It indicates that the proposed algorithm can obtain accurate estimation results and has strong robustness. Moreover, the simulation results after adding noise errors to the current and voltage values reveal that the algorithm can eliminate the sensor accuracy effect to a certain extent.

This study designs an active equilibrium control strategy based on model predictive control (MPC) for series battery packs. To shorten equalisation time and reduce unnecessary energy consumption, bidirectional active equalisation is modelled and analysed, and the model predictive control algorithm is then applied to the established state space equation. The optimisation problem that minimises the equilibrium time is transformed to a linear programming form in each cycle. By solving the linear programming problem online, a group of control optimal solutions is found and the series equalisation problem is decoupled. The equalisation time is shortened by dynamically adjusting the equalisation current. Simulation results show that the MPC algorithm can avoid unnecessary energy transfer and shorten equalisation time. The bench experimental result shows that the equilibrium time is reduced by 31%, verifying the rationality of the MPC strategy.