To reduce energy consumption or improve energy efficiency, the regenerative devices recently have drawn the public’s eyes. In this paper, a novel hydraulic energy-regenerative shock absorber (HERSA) is developed for vehicle suspension to regenerate the vibration energy which is dissipated by conventional viscous dampers into heat waste. At first, the schematic of HERSA is presented and a mathematic model is developed to describe the characteristic of HERSA. Then the parametric sensitivity analysis of the vibration energy is expounded, and the ranking of their influences is k1≫m2>m1>k2≈cs. Besides, a parametric study of HERSA is adopted to research the influences of the key parameters on the characteristic of HERSA. Moreover, an optimization of HERSA is carried out to regenerate more power as far as possible without devitalizing the damping characteristic. To make the optimization results more close to the actual condition, the displacement data of the shock absorber in the road test is selected as the excitation in the optimization. The results show that the RMS of regenerated energy is up to 107.94 W under the actual excitation. Moreover it indicates that the HERSA can improve its performance through the damping control.

We focus on the study of motion stability of vehicle nonlinear dynamics. The dynamic model combining with Burckhardt tire model is firstly derived. By phase portrait method, the vehicle stability differences of three cases, front wheels steering/four-wheel steering case, front/rear/four-wheel braking case, and high/low road friction case, are characterized. With the Jacobian matrix, the stable equilibrium point is found and stable areas are calculated out. Similarly, the stability boundaries corresponding to different working conditions are also captured. With vehicle braking or accelerating in the steering process, the relationship between front/rear wheel slippage and the stable area is examined. Comparing with current literatures, the research method and its results present the novelty and provide a guideline for new vehicle controller design.

A brake-by-wire system is considered the best solution to realize advanced functions in electric vehicles/hybrid electric vehicles and intelligent vehicles. In this article, a novel electro-hydraulic brake system is proposed. The main issues in the development of the proposed electro-hydraulic brake system focus on hydraulic loop design and pressure tracking control. Instead of an accumulator, a large displacement piston pump coupled to a high-power motor is applied to meet the demand of pressure boost. A passive pedal feel simulator is designed to decouple the brake pedal and the wheel cylinders. The high pressure in the wheel cylinders is controlled by de/activating the motor and valves to track the reference pressure. To minimize the pressure instability observed in previous proportional–integral–derivative controller tests, a self-tuning generalized predictive controller is applied. Models of each system’s dynamic process are derived, and the parameters are identified through test data. A sliding mode differentiator is used to filter the sensor signals and improve the pressure boost performance in hard brake maneuvers. A rapid control prototype test environment based on dSPACE is built to verify and adjust the controller. The simulation results using MATLAB/Simulink and bench tests are presented and analyzed. Tracking performances show that compared to a proportional–integral–derivative controller, the proposed controller has a better effect in lowering pressure overshoots and start–stop frequency.

This paper presents a parameter estimation, robust controller design and performance analysis for an electric power steering (EPS) system. The parametrical analysis includes the EPS parameters and disturbances, such as the assist motor parameters, sensor-measurement noise, and random road factors, allowing the EPS stability to be extensively investigated. Based on the loop-shaping technique, the system controller is designed to increase the EPS stability and performance. The loop-shaping procedure is proposed to minimize the influence of system disturbances on the system outputs. The simplified refined instrumental variable (SRIV) algorithm, least squares state variable filter (LSSVF) algorithm and instrumental variable state variable filter (IVSVF) algorithm are applied to reduce the model mismatching between the theoretical EPS models and the real EPS model, as the EPS parameters can be accurately identified based on the experimental EPS data. The performance of the proposed method is thus compared to that of the proportional-integral-derivative (PID) test bench results for the EPS system. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed loop-shaping controller provides good tracking performance while ensuring the stability of the EPS system.

Connected and automated vehicle platoons (CAVPs) are considered an effective way to alleviate traffic congestion, reduce the incidence of traffic accidents, and improve vehicle economy in the intelligent transportation system (ITS). Vehicles in the CAVPs can communicate with each other through V2X technology, which could optimize the economy of the platoon. Cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) can make effective use of the characteristics of CAVPs and contribute to resource conservation, ecological driving, and traffic system development. In this paper, a two‐stage CACC method is proposed for CAVPs to reduce fuel consumption in the multislope road section. In the first stage, the optimal velocity profiles for the leader based on dynamic programming (DP) are planned according to the road information and the fuel consumption model. In the second stage, a vehicle longitudinal third‐order differential dynamics model is utilized to build the platoon time‐delay system considering communication delay and actuator delay. A feedback controller is developed for each vehicle considering the internal stability and the string stability of the CAVPs. Results show that the proposed method can save 5.33% of fuel consumption compared to the constant speed cooperative adaptive cruise control (CS‐CACC) method and has a better tracking performance compared to the model predictive control (MPC) method. The CACC method proposed in this paper can provide a theoretical basis and data support for building an ecological CACC strategy for CAVPs.