Hiroki Kawashima

Development of Autonomous Platooning System for Heavy-Duty Trucks

Abstract In Japan, the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization established the gEnergy ITS projecth in 2008 for reducing CO2 emissions. This project aims to develop techniques for autonomous platooning of heavy-duty trucks and reduce their air resistance in expressway driving. In platooning, the inter-truck distance should remain small and constant. This study proposes a novel control method for platooning of heavy-duty trucks. The proposed method uses information acquired from the front and rear trucks by inter-vehicle communication. String stability is guaranteed on the basis of the Lyapunov stability theory. The experimental results of autonomous platooning are provided to ascertain the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Preceding Vehicle Following Based on Path Following Control for Platooning

Abstract A project to develop a platoon system, called “Energy ITS”, has been proceeding by NEDO (New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization) in Japan. In a platoon, several automated vehicles run as one group. In this paper, an autonomous steering control method to follow the preceding vehicle is proposed without the information of roads lane marker based on a lane keeping method. The experimental results are shown to confirm the usefulness of our proposed method.

Evaluation of Fuzzy Inference-based Self-tuning of Steering Control Gains for Heavy-duty Trucks

As the number of automobiles in worldwide increases, the number of associated serious environmental and safety problems also increases. A solution to these problems is an autonomous platooning system for trucks, which is expected to have various effects such as reduction in carbon dioxide emissions and increase in traffic capacity. Although various control laws have been proposed for automated driving, control gains are typically tuned manually. The optimal values change owing to the freight or over a period of several years. Therefore, when the control performance decreases, gain tuning is again required. In this study, as additional evaluations of the proposed self-tuning method, we newly examine if the method can adjust gain to the change of a freight weight by simulation and evaluate the convergence property of the method experimentally.

Safety Testing of an Improved Brake System for Automatic Platooning of Trucks

An automatic platooning technology for energy-saving logistics utilizing intelligent transportation systems (ITS) technologies have been developed in the Energy-Saving ITS Project of Japan. The automatic platooning of trucks is studied to save energy consumption by reducing air resistance. Considering the experimental testing and practical application for automatic platooning, it is important to ensure driver safety, and high levels of safety and efficacy are required for truck braking systems. Therefore, a new brake system for automatic platooning needs to be developed. In this study, two approaches are proposed. One is to design a secondary brake system working in a fail situation with the main brake system, the other is to adjust for different maximum decelerations for the preceding and following trucks. In the first step, the proposed measure was investigated using an actual vehicle and a simulation experiment. Based on this, the proposed brake system was developed and mounted on the experimental trucks, and full brake testing was carried out to evaluate its effectiveness. The experimental result showed that the improved brake system was effective in ensuring brake safety by incorporating these functions in the trucks.