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.
