Yoshitada Suzuki

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.

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.

Parameter Identification of a Vehicle for Automatic Platooning Control

Automatic platooning control of heavy-duty trucks requires accurate vehicle parameters because control performance is significantly affected by the load. We propose new identification methods for the identification of parameters such as vehicle mass and center of gravity using experiments with a real vehicle. The validity of these methods was confirmed with high accuracy comparisons between measured and estimated results.

A new concept of brake system for ITS platoon heavy duty trucks and its pre-evaluation

Previously ITS system or ITS technology was aiming some of new brake through technologies. It is quite important for beginning of ITS. Currently ITS engineers need to consider more mass production aspect, such as less energy consumption, cost efficiency, systems redundancy and so on. However those are kind of difficult to be succeed at the same time. Especially, brake system is not simple to achieve both redundancy and cost efficiency. Another aspect of consideration for platoon truck needs individual required deceleration G when the system is failed to maintain a short range distance. Naturally, the only way to avoid a collision is that the driver voluntary activate their brake. However, if all of the platoon trucks has the same maximum deceleration G, it would make a collision because of short range distance. Thus individual deceleration G within a short distance range for the platoon truck is key point of avoiding collision. In this paper, a new concept of brake system was proposed to solve such difficulties. In addition, in order to satisfy some of the brake systems necessities, the author focused on using previous EBS system properties and adding an active brake air flow control. This system can control real time brake air, which is based on individual vehicles required deceleration G, payload and son on.