Investigation on the Model-Based Control Performance in Vehicle Safety Critical Scenarios with Varying Tyre Limits

In recent years the increasing needs of reducing the costs of car development expressed by the automotive market have determined a rapid development of virtual driver prototyping tools that aims at reproducing vehicle behaviors. Nevertheless, these advanced tools are still not designed to exploit the entire vehicle dynamics potential, preferring to assure the minimum requirements in the worst possible operating conditions instead. Furthermore, their calibration is typically performed in a pre-defined strict range of operating conditions, established by specific regulations or OEM routines. For this reason, their performance can considerably decrease in particularly crucial safetycritical situations, where the environmental conditions (rain, snow, ice), the road singularities (oil stains, puddles, holes), and the tyre thermal and ageing phenomena can deeply affect the adherence potential. The objective of the work is to investigate the possibility of the physical model-based control to take into account the variations in terms of the dynamic behavior of the systems and of the boundary conditions. Different scenarios with specific tyre thermal and wear conditions have been tested on diverse road surfaces validating the designed model predictive control algorithm in a hardware-in-the-loop real-time environment and demonstrating the augmented reliability of an advanced virtual driver aware of available information concerning the tyre dynamic limits. The multidisciplinary proposal will provide a paradigm shift in the development of strategies and a solid breakthrough towards enhanced development of the driving automatization systems, unleashing the potential of physical modeling to the next level of vehicle control, able to exploit and to take into account the multi-physical tyre variations.

Analysis of Powered Roof Support Operation Based on a Virtual Driver

The article presents the results of tests and analyses of control functions performed by a powered roof support which is the basic part of a powered longwall system. The research was based on an innovative registration and measurement system dedicated to this specific range of tests. The basic element of this system is a virtual driver. It is equipped with input and output systems to connect standard physical voltage signals. The tests were carried out on a prototype powered roof support type ZPR- 15/35-POz. The presented research methodology and obtained results are an element of new research methods developed for powered support based on virtual controllers. The applied solution generates less costs than the devices currently used, while its functionality is significantly greater. The system developed by the Authors supports innovative and, to a certain extent, intelligent IT solutions for testing control elements. This developed system is suitable to be applied in a wide range of research such as diagnosis of mining machinery control elements and other industries in the near future.