Benchmarking of Wheel Corner Concepts Towards Optimal Comfort by Automated Driving

Project Information

OWHEEL

Grant agreement ID: 872907

DOI

10.3030/872907

Project closed

EC signature date 27 November 2019

Start date 1 January 2020

End date 31 December 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 644 000,00

EU contribution

€ 602 600,00

Coordinated by

TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITAET ILMENAU
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - OWHEEL (Benchmarking of Wheel Corner Concepts Towards Optimal Comfort by Automated Driving)

Reporting period: 2023-01-01 to 2024-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

OWHEEL is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions RISE project establishing and supporting a collaborative re-search, innovation and training activities between industrial and academic partners from European countries, Japan and South Africa. The project has a focus on a disruptive engineering of alternative vehicle chassis concepts for future automated driving (AD) mobility. The OWHEEL works will cover development, industrial implementation and testing of innovative wheel corners for electric vehicles having automation level 4 to 5 in accordance with SAE J3016 standard. These works are the back-bone of strong multidisciplinary professional network that will extend beyond OWHEEL’s lifespan and is envisaged to respond to emerging skills needs in the automotive sector.

Recent industrial outcomes in this area revealed that development of automated vehicles need a paradigm shift regarding the systems design due to the important change in the transition from partial to high automation. The act of driving makes drivers practically insensitive to motion sickness and acceleration discomfort, while passive passengers typically suffer most. The mentioned paradigm shift is being characterized as follows:
- Self-learning and self-configuration techniques not only for the high-level control (e.g. related to the vehicle path planning) but also for the low-level control (related to coordinated operation of vehicle chas-sis and powertrain actuators);
- Targeted use of actuators having exceptionally high operating and response performance to address AD-specific requirements to driving safety and comfort;
- Simultaneous operation of various on-board systems from different physical domains (i.e. electric motors, hydraulic and electro-hydraulic actuators) that requires optimal strategies for their blended control by independent criteria such as fault-tolerance;
- AD requires the evaluation of the performance of relevant systems taking into account the shift from the active involvement of the driver to a passive role; therefore, the requirements related to comfort and the ability to perform different tasks become essential.

Considering both importance and complexity of these aspects, the project is addresing the following overall goal: Development and evaluation of new concepts of automotive wheel corners tailored to achieve significant reduction of user discomfort during automated driving with simultaneous fulfilment of requirements to safety and robustness.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Based on the preliminary state-of-the-art analysis, the consortium identified four different classes of wheel corners for subsequent benchmarking. These classes can be conditionally introduced as follows:

1) “Passive corner with specific wheel positioning” – The improvement in the driving comfort has to be achieved through the packaging design allowing specific wheel positioning (e.g. with extra cambering) to provide targeted tyre-road interaction dynamics.
2) “Passive composite corner” – The improvement in the driving comfort has to be achieved through new de-sign of the corner with composite materials (only passive suspension is being considered).
3) “Active corner with ordinary ride dynamics control” – The control on the driving comfort is realized through (semi-)active suspension with enhanced control strategies;
4) “Active corner with integrated wheel positioning control” – The control on the driving comfort is realized through the cooperative control on the wheel camber, toe and caster angle through mechatronic actuators.

For each proposed concept, the project includes relevant stages of development design, simulation studies, driver-in-the-loop investigations and experimental validation.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The project is expecting the follwoing progress vs. the state-of-the-art:

- OWHEEL will improve electronic suspension behaviour to the users’ wishes by direct incorporation of users’ subjective perception metrics and advanced passenger modelling/estimation, based on the subjective metrics’ findings with a focus on the sensitivity/classification of user perception in the possible balancing of these attributes by novel approaches in hybrid active suspension control strategies.
- OWHEEL will investigate procedures for determining the difference thresholds relating to driving comfort of automated vehicles on driving simulators and real-world testing.
- Achievements of the OWHEEL partners in field of innovative materials will be used to optimize masses and inertia moments and to maximize the effective volume inside the vehicle.
- Within the project OWHEEL multi-objective optimization algo-rithms with high RT capability will be developed using online optimization methods to achieve optimal sub-systems’ operation as well as focus on vehicle safety and comfort-oriented tasks.

Broad impact of the OWHEEL project at the European level will be provided by facilitating engineering and professional advancement in industry through the university-industry collaboration. The proposed MSCA-RISE instrument will make a strong contribution to global competitiveness of participating organizations in academic sector. The OWHEEL project objectives are also in line with innovation activities of the OEMs and suppliers of automated vehi-cle systems that gives a good base for reinforcement of the existing co-operation between academia and industry at the European level within the field of AD technologies.

Concept vehicle