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.

Multicriteria decision making (MCDM) problems are often encountered in complex system design. Most of them need to be evaluated with a large number of interactive and qualitative indices, which are difficult to be addressed effectively through the existing methods. In this paper, a novel fuzzy Choquet integral-based grey comprehensive evaluation (GCE) method, called fuzzy grey Choquet integral (FGCI), is proposed to evaluate MCDM problems with many interactive and qualitative indices. In this method, expert evaluation of qualitative indices is represented through fuzzy linguistic values. Fuzzy values are defuzzified and standardized to obtain the original evaluation matrix. The original values are replaced by the correlation coefficients, which, to a certain extent, eliminate the influence of experts' subjective preference. An improved teaching-learning-based optimization algorithm is employed to identify λ -fuzzy-measures following the weights given by experts in order to enhance the consistency of weights. Then the correlation coefficients are aggregated through Choquet integral among λ -fuzzy-measures, which can reflect interactions among indices. In addition, according to the characteristics of λ -fuzzy-measures, the construction guidelines for a corresponding index system are given to overcome the limitations of FGCI. Finally, the performance of the proposed method is demonstrated via a practical example of green design evaluation and compared with the GCE method. The results validate its feasibility and effectiveness.

The application of inter-vehicle wireless communi-cation offers significant advantages in terms of improving traffic efficiency and safety while also suffering from unreliable communication links. This paper deals with the problem of event-triggered vehicular platoon control with communication time delay and package dropout, aiming to achieve a suitable trade-off between communication utilization and vehicle following performance. A disturbance based platoon model with communication time delay, package dropout and event-triggered scheme is established. Subsequently, the criterion for co-designing the event-trigger parameters and CACC controller parameters is derived by adopting the parameter space approach with the requirements to ensure individual vehicle internal stability, following accuracy and platoon string stability. To achieve a superior trade-off between communication resource utilization and following performance under unreliable communication condition, the adaptive event-triggered threshold is designed for the varying failure probability. The effectiveness of the proposed adaptive CACC strategy is verified using numerical simulations of a six-vehicle platoon during the FTP 72 drive cycle. The comparison results of three different scenarios show that the adaptive event-triggered scheme guarantees the following performance even when failure probability is 0.4.

Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO) is subjected to additional unobservable directions under the special motions of ground vehicles, resulting in larger pose estimation errors. To address this problem, a tightly-coupled Ackermann visual-inertial odometry (ACK-MSCKF) is proposed to fuse Ackermann error state measurements and the Stereo Multi-State Constraint Kalman Filter (S-MSCKF) with a tightly-coupled filter-based mechanism. In contrast with S-MSCKF, in which the inertial measurement unit (IMU) propagates the vehicle motion and then the propagation is corrected by stereo visual measurements, we successively update the propagation with Ackermann error state measurements and visual measurements after the process model and state augmentation. This way, additional constraints from the Ackermann measurements are exploited to improve the pose estimation accuracy. Both qualitative and quantitative experimental results evaluated under real-world datasets from an Ackermann steering vehicle lead to the following demonstration: ACK-MSCKF can significantly improve the pose estimation accuracy of S-MSCKF under the special motions of autonomous vehicles, and keep accurate and robust pose estimation available under different vehicle driving cycles and environmental conditions. This paper accompanies the source code for the robotics community.

As a significant technology in the automotive manufacturing industry, weight reduction in vehicle design has attracted much attention. Its effect on energy saving and emission reduction is prominent. The application of lightweight material is commonly adopted as a primary way of weight reduction. However, material selection is often subject to multi-perspective performance characteristics, e.g., mechanical and societal properties, and therefore, an effective multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method is needed. This paper presents a systematic hierarchical structure of multi-perspective indices for optimal lightweight material selection, including mechanical, durability, societal, and technical properties. A hybrid evaluation approach (G-TOPSIS) integrating grey relation analysis and technique for order performance by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) is applied to evaluate lightweight material alternatives and obtain an optimal one. A case study, i.e., 17 kinds of lightweight materials, is conducted to verify the hierarchical structure and the MCDM method. In addition, a sensitivity analysis is conducted to monitor the robustness of solution ranking to changes. The results show that this method provides an effective decision-making tool for optimal lightweight material selection for automobile applications.