In a mixed traffic environment of human and autonomous driving, it is crucial for an autonomous vehicle to predict the lane change intentions and trajectories of vehicles that pose a risk to it. However, due to the uncertainty of human intentions, accurately predicting lane change intentions and trajectories is a great challenge. Therefore, this paper aims to establish the connection between intentions and trajectories and propose a dual Transformer model for the target vehicle. The dual Transformer model contains a lane change intention prediction model and a trajectory prediction model. The lane change intention prediction model is able to extract social correlations in terms of vehicle states and outputs an intention probability vector. The trajectory prediction model fuses the intention probability vector, which enables it to obtain prior knowledge. For the intention prediction model, the accuracy can be improved by designing the multi-head attention. For the trajectory prediction model, the performance can be optimized by incorporating intention probability vectors and adding the LSTM. Verified on NGSIM and highD datasets, the experimental results show that this model has encouraging accuracy. Compared with the model without intention probability vectors, the impact of the model on NGSIM dataset and highD dataset in RMSE is improved by 57.27% and 58.70% respectively. Compared with two existed models, evaluation metrics of the intention prediction can be improved by 7.40-10.09% on NGSIM dataset and 2.17-2.69% on highD dataset within advanced prediction time 1s. This method provides the insights for designing advanced perceptual systems for autonomous vehicles.

In order to identify the abnormal road surface condition efficiently and at low cost, a road surface condition recognition method is proposed based on the vibration acceleration generated by a smartphone when the vehicle passes through the abnormal road surface. The improved Gaussian background model is used to extract the features of the abnormal pavement, and the k-nearest neighbor (kNN) algorithm is used to distinguish the abnormal pavement types, including pothole and bump. Comparing with the existing works, the influence of vehicles with different suspension characteristics on the detection threshold is studied in this paper, and an adaptive adjustment mechanism based on vehicle speed is proposed. After comparing the field investigation results with the algorithm recognition results, the accuracy of the proposed algorithm is rigorously evaluated. The test results show that the vehicle vibration acceleration contains the road surface condition information, which can be used to identify the abnormal road conditions. The test result shows that the accuracy of the recognition of the road surface pothole is 96.03%, and the accuracy of the road surface bump is 94.12%. The proposed road surface recognition method can be utilized to replace the special patrol vehicle for timely and low-cost road maintenance.

With the development of intelligent transportation system (ITS) and vehicle to X (V2X), the connected vehicle is capable of sensing a great deal of useful traffic information, such as queue length at intersections. Aiming to solve the problem of existing models’ complexity and information redundancy, this paper proposes a queue length sensing model based on V2X technology, which consists of two sub-models based on shockwave sensing and back propagation (BP) neural network sensing. First, the model obtains state information of the connected vehicles and analyzes the formation process of the queue, and then it calculates the velocity of the shockwave to predict the queue length of the subsequent unconnected vehicles. Then, the neural network is trained with historical connected vehicle data, and a sub-model based on the BP neural network is established to predict the real-time queue length. Finally, the final queue length at the intersection is determined by combining the sub-models by variable weight. Simulation results show that the sensing accuracy of the combined model is proportional to the penetration rate of connected vehicles, and sensing of queue length can be achieved even in low penetration rate environments. In mixed traffic environments of connected vehicles and unconnected vehicles, the queuing length sensing model proposed in this paper has higher performance than the probability distribution (PD) model when the penetration rate is low, and it has an almost equivalent performance with higher penetration rate while the penetration rate is not needed. The proposed sensing model is more applicable for mixed traffic scenarios with much looser conditions.

Car-following is an essential trajectory control strategy for the autonomous vehicle, which not only improves traffic efficiency, but also reduces fuel consumption and emissions. However, the prediction of lane change intentions in adjacent lanes is problematic, and will significantly affect the car-following control of the autonomous vehicle, especially when the vehicle changing lanes is only a connected unintelligent vehicle without expensive and accurate sensors. Autonomous vehicles suffer from adjacent vehicles’ abrupt lane changes, which may reduce ride comfort and increase energy consumption, and even lead to a collision. A machine learning-based lane change intention prediction and real time autonomous vehicle controller is proposed to respond to this problem. First, an interval-based support vector machine is designed to predict the vehicles’ lane change intention utilizing limited low-level vehicle status through vehicle-to-vehicle communication. Then, a conditional artificial potential field method is used to design the car-following controller by incorporating the lane-change intentions of the vehicle. Experimental results reveal that the proposed method can estimate a vehicle’s lane change intention more accurately. The autonomous vehicle avoids collisions with a lane-changing connected unintelligent vehicle with reliable safety and favorable dynamic performance.

Accurate state of charge (SOC) plays a vital role in battery management systems (BMSs). Among several developed SOC estimation methods, the extended Kalman filter (EKF) has been extensively applied. However, EKF cannot achieve valid estimation when the model accuracy is inadequate, the noise covariance matrix is uncertain, and the sensor has large errors. This paper makes two contributions to overcome these drawbacks: (1) A variable forgetting factor recursive least squares (VFFRLS) is proposed to accomplish parameters identification. This method updates the forgetting factor according to the innovation sequence, which accuracy is superior to the forgetting factor recursive least squares (FFRLS); (2) an adaptive tracking EKF (ATEKF) is proposed to estimate the SOC of the battery. In ATEKF, the error covariance matrix is adaptively corrected according to the innovation sequence and correction factor. The value of the correction factor is related to the actual error. Proposed algorithms are validated with a publicly available dataset from the University of Maryland. The experimental results indicate that the identification error of VFFRLS can be reduced from 0.05% to 0.018%. Additionally, ATEKF has better accuracy and robustness than EKF when having large sensor errors and uncertainty of the error covariance matrix, in which case it can reduce SOC estimation error from 1.09% to 0.15%.

The Bird-like Flapping-wing Air Vehicle (BFAV) is a robotic innovation that emulates the flight patterns of birds. In comparison to fixed-wing and rotary-wing air vehicles, the BFAV offers superior attributes such as stealth, enhanced maneuverability, strong adaptability, and low noise, which render the BFAV a promising prospect for numerous applications. Consequently, it represents a crucial direction of research in the field of air vehicles for the foreseeable future. However, the flapping-wing vehicle is a nonlinear and unsteady system, posing significant challenges for BFAV to achieve autonomous flying since it is difficult to analyze and characterize using traditional methods and aerodynamics. Hence, flight control as a major key for flapping-wing air vehicles to achieve autonomous flight garners considerable attention from scholars. This paper presents an exposition of the flight principles of BFAV, followed by a comprehensive analysis of various significant factors that impact bird flight. Subsequently, a review of the existing literature on flight control in BFAV is conducted, and the flight control of BFAV is categorized into three distinct components: position control, trajectory tracking control, and formation control. Additionally, the latest advancements in control algorithms for each component are deliberated and analyzed. Ultimately, a projection on forthcoming directions of research is presented.