Veröffentlichungen

The emergence of new electric vehicle (EV) corner concepts with in-wheel motors offers numerous opportunities to improve handling, comfort, and stability. This study investigates the potential of controlling the vehicle's corner positioning by changing wheel toe and camber angles. A high-fidelity simulation environment was used to evaluate the proposed solution. The effects of the placement of the corresponding actuators and the actuation point on the force required during cornering were investigated. The results demonstrate that the toe angle, compared to the camber angle, offers more effect for improving the vehicle dynamics. The developed direct yaw rate control with four toe actuators improves stability, has a positive effect on comfort, and contributes to the development of new active corner architectures for electric and automated vehicles.

Dust testing of vehicles on unpaved roads is crucial in the development process for automotive manufacturers. These tests aim to ensure the functionality of locking systems in dusty conditions, minimize dust concentration inside the vehicle, and enhance customer comfort by preventing dust accumulation on the car body. Additionally, deposition on safety-critical parts, such as windshields and sensors, can pose threats to driver vision and autonomous driving capabilities. Currently, dust tests are primarily conducted experimentally at proving grounds. In order to gain early insights and reduce the need for costly physical tests, numerical simulations are becoming a promising alternative. Although simulations of vehicle contamination by dry dust have been studied in the past, they have often lacked detailed models for tire dust resuspension. In addition, few publications address the specifics of dust deposition on vehicles, especially in areas such as door gaps and locks. Many authors focus primarily on the environmental impact of vehicles due to non-exhaust emissions, such as tire and road wear particles (TRWP) and brake wear on paved roads. To close this gap, this paper presents an experimental test in which a vehicle drives through a dry dust track. Using special dust measurement techniques positioned in the wheelhouse, we determine the number and size distribution of the dust particle field around the tire circumference. The results of this experiment provide a deeper understanding of the dust dispersion patterns generated by tires on unpaved surfaces and serve as valuable data for boundary conditions and for the validation of CFD (computational fluid dynamics) simulations.

Integrated chassis control systems represent a significant advancement in the dynamics of ground vehicles, aimed at enhancing overall performance, comfort, handling, and stability. As vehicles transition from internal combustion to electric platforms, integrated chassis control systems have evolved to meet the demands of electrification and automation. This paper analyses the overall control structure of automated vehicles with integrated chassis control systems. Integration of longitudinal, lateral, and vertical systems presents complexities due to the overlapping control regions of various subsystems. The presented methodology includes a comprehensive examination of state-of-the-art technologies, focusing on algorithms to manage control actions and prevent interference between subsystems. The results underscore the importance of control allocation to exploit the additional degrees of freedom offered by over-actuated systems. This paper systematically overviews the various control methods applied in integrated chassis control and path tracking. This includes a detailed examination of perception and decision-making, parameter estimation techniques, reference generation strategies, and the hierarchy of controllers, encompassing high-level, middle-level, and low-level control components. By offering this systematic overview, this paper aims to facilitate a deeper understanding of the diverse control methods employed in automated driving with integrated chassis control, providing insights into their applications, strengths, and limitations.

Design space exploration is a crucial aspect of engineering and optimization, focused on identifying optimal design configurations for complex systems with a high degree of freedom in the actor set. It involves systematic exploration while considering various constraints and requirements. One of the key challenges in design space exploration is the need for a control strategy tailored to the particular design. In this context, reinforcement learning has emerged as a promising solution approach for automatically inferring control strategies, thereby enabling efficient comparison of different designs. However, learning the optimal policy is computationally intensive, as the agent determines the optimal policy through trial and error. The focus of this study is on learning a single strategy for a given design and scenario, enabling the evaluation of numerous architectures within a limited time frame. The study also highlights the importance of plant modeling considering different modeling approaches to effectively capture the system complexity on the example of vehicle dynamics. In addition, a careful selection of an appropriate hyperparameter set for the reinforcement learning algorithm is emphasized to improve the overall performance and optimization process.

Due to a number of advantages over traditional development methods, the importance of dynamic driving simulators in automotive research and development has grown continuously in recent years. Motion simulation via motion cueing algorithms contributes significantly to the driving experience and provides the driver with valuable information about the current driving dynamics. The adaptation and tuning process of these algorithms can be difficult and timeconsuming tasks. It needs to be repeated after changes to the vehicle or driving scenario. This paper discusses and presents an adaptive or rather self-adapting motion cueing algorithm (MCA) concept. The approach is based on the integration of a kinematic reference model to dynamically and adaptively adjust the motion behavior dynamically and adaptively. This concept allows to reduce the parameter tuning effort drastically in long term, since the algorithm can adapt itself to different conditions such as vehicle type, driving situation, or driver behavior. In the following, the proposed algorithm structure is explained and illustrated. The advantages of the proposed MCA are demonstrated by an experimental comparison with a classical algorithm. Thereby it is shown how a self-adaptation of the algorithm can proceed and how to avoid violation of workspace boundaries.