For better lateral dynamic stability of an A-double vehicle (comprising a tractor, semitrailer, dolly, and another semitrailer) at high speeds, it is a practical and economical way to control the dolly, a linking structure for long combination vehicles (LCVs). This paper proposes a simple differential brake control strategy based on the feedback of the yaw rate of the dolly. A stability analysis approach is employed by exploring the relationship between damping ratios and speeds, and the critical speed of an A-double vehicle is found. Next, the relationship between the A-double vehicle's damping ratios and the feedback parameter employed in this differential brake control approach is examined, showing that a more favorable feedback value can raise the vehicle's minimum damping ratio. Finally, the method of selecting feedback parameters is also provided, considering the adhesion utilization demanded by the dolly. The time-domain simulation confirms that the stability analysis utilizing the damping ratio is accurate. Using MATLAB/Simulink at various speeds, the effectiveness of this control strategy is tested under single lane-change operations. According to these simulation results, the A-double vehicle using the differential control strategy has a higher critical speed and maintains stability during single lane-change operations at high speeds. This verified that the simple differential brake control strategy has the potential to significantly increase the lateral dynamic stability of the A -double vehicle at high speeds during single-lane change operations economically and practically.

High-performance vision-based decision-making networks are often limited by hardware capabilities in practical applications. To address this challenge, this study proposes lightweight optimization strategies for decision-making models from the aspects of parameter size, training memory usage, and inference speed. Specifically, an innovative solution is proposed to achieve lightweight parameters. The Video Swin Transformer is employed to simultaneously extract temporal and spatial features, with the network trained using a Prioritized Replay Deep Q-Network (PRDQN) that incorporates risk assessment. To further reduce training memory usage, the Q-target network in PRDQN is removed, and the mellowmax operator is integrated to enhance the training process, resulting in the PRDeepMellow Swin Transformer. After analyzing the inference speed problems encountered by the algorithm in practical applications, the vanilla self-attention is replaced by a linear self-attention based on double softmax, namely Double Softmax Linear Video Swin Transformer (DSLVS Transformer) which improves the inference speed for long sequences. The proposed methods were evaluated across three high-speed lane change scenarios (a static scenario, a dynamic scenario, and a randomly changing scenario). Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methods can still maintain excellent decision performance after the corresponding lightweight optimizations.

Designing brain-computer interface systems for electroencephalogram (EEG)-based driver drowsiness recognition remains a significant challenge due to the significant variation in EEG signals across subjects and recording sessions. To address this problem, this paper develops a novel two-stage information transfer strategy framework for domain generalization. The framework has two domain mappers to reduce the distribution differences of EEG features from different individuals, a mapper mix block for generating hybrid mapping features, and a domain adversarial neural network (DANN) for drowsiness recognition based on hybrid EEG features. In the process of DANN to capture common features, we additionally employ two models based on self-attention mechanism to capture domain-invariant attention relationships between electrode channels and between frequency bands. Experimental results show that the proposed framework achieves an average accuracy of 81.34% in the leave-one-out cross validation for driver drowsiness recognition, which is higher than the state-of-the-art model with the number of 79.37%. In addition, we explore the impact of EEG features from different frequency bands and brain regions on this cross-subject task. The results show that EEG features from delta, theta and alpha bands can achieve much better performance than the other two bands, and features from the frontal lobe region perform better than the other regions. These findings reveal domain-invariant features and their relationships with brain regions and frequency bands, enhancing our understanding of the underlying messages of EEG signals.

Traffic congestion is a common phenomenon in city traffic, which may cause drivers' negative emotion to degrade driving safety. It has been reported that music can regulate human emotion and the influence of negative emotion continuously challenges driving safety in post-congestion traffic. Therefore, this study aims to examine the effect of different music intervention strategies on mitigating drivers' negative emotion in post-congestion driving. Three experiments (i.e., driving with soft music, driving with disco jockey (DJ) music, and driving without music) are designed to collect drivers' driving performance measures, eye movement and electroencephalogram (EEG) responses in post-congestion driving. The results show that the music intervention strategies influence drivers' eye movement and EEG responses to varying degrees but do not have distinct effect in driving performance measures. These obtained results indicate that designing personalized music intervention strategies might help mitigate drivers' negative emotion to increase driving safety and comfort.

In-vehicle human-machine interface (HMI) plays a significant role in accomplishing effective interactions between driving automation systems and drivers, especially during the transition of control. For this reason, different in-vehicle HMIs have been designed to convey additional semantic information from the driving automation systems to the drivers to realize safer, smoother, and better control transitions. This review summarizes and analyses 86 previously published studies that researched the effects of additional semantic information delivered through in-vehicle HMIs just before, during and right after takeover request (TOR). The additional semantic information mentioned in this review refer to the information beyond simple alerts to not only gain drivers’ attention but also additionally communicate contextual content and explanation to the drivers regarding its own purpose. In this review, the additional semantic information are categorized according to their purposes and effects into three aspects: mode awareness enhancement, situation awareness enhancement, and takeover maneuver assistance. The specificities and the corresponding concerns when applying additional semantic information to in-vehicle HMIs have been detailed analyzed throughout the entire article. Further suggestions are proposed for what should be carefully considered when adding additional information for better takeover. Prospects into future in-vehicle HMI possibilities are also raised that could be applied in both academic research and industry.

Although latent hazard notification for highly automated driving is expected to enhance traffic safety, its practical effects have yet to be verified. This study systemically investigated the expected safety benefits and driver behavioral adaptation based on structural equation modeling. First, we developed a notification system to inform drivers of latent hazards with auditory alerts and conducted a driving simulation experiment involving eyes-off-road situations. To test the system, we adopted two types of events (i.e., the collision avoidance function working or failure) in which latent hazards transform into immediate risks. Then, a measurement model was developed to evaluate driver trust, driver attention, and traffic safety. Subsequently, we examined the corresponding causal relationships. On the one hand, latent hazard notification significantly improves driver attention (i.e., more fixations on latent hazards, less engagement in non-driving-related tasks, and faster notice of immediate risks), which significantly enhances traffic safety. On the other hand, latent hazard notification significantly increases driver trust, which lowers driver attention and consequently impairs traffic safety. This causality reveals driver behavioral adaptation, although driver trust does not directly affect traffic safety. Overall, we find that latent hazard notification for highly automated driving can improve traffic safety, but the consequent driver behavioral adaptation impairs 15.12% of the expected safety benefits.

For highly automated vehicles, effective take-over performance measures are essential for establishing quantitative take-over models and exploring approaches to improve take-over performance. However, there is a lack of comprehensive take-over performance measures that suitably combine multiple objective metrics based on an average evaluation from human drivers. In this study, we proposed a human-centered comprehensive measure of take-over performance (HCMTP). There are four main building blocks for the HCMTP. First, we adopted sparse principal component analysis to identify the main aspects of take-over performance based on multiple original objective take-over performance metrics. Second, we developed a scale of take-over performance assessment to obtain drivers’ original subjective self-assessments of take-over performance. Third, we established nonlinear individual mapping functions to acquire different drivers’ evaluation criteria for take-over performance. Fourth, we proposed a relabeling algorithm to obtain drivers’ average evaluation of take-over performance. To verify the effectiveness of the HCMTP, we conducted a verification experiment involving 68 participants. The results indicate that the HCMTP is effective and able to reduce the interference of individual differences, stochasticity, and data imbalance. This study contributes to identifying the main aspects of take-over performance, systematically understanding how human drivers subjectively evaluate take-over performance, and evaluating drivers’ take-over performance comprehensively.

As human-machine collaborative driving systems, highly automated driving vehicles require human drivers to take over when take-over requests are triggered. Extensive studies have shown that drivers’ take-over performance is affected by their fatigue state, traffic conditions, and the take-over time budget (TB). However, there is still a paucity of a systematic understanding of how these factors affect take-over performance, which prevents the implementation of adaptive take-over systems. This study establishes a highly accurate take-over performance prediction model to systematically explore the effects of these factors on take-over performance and to propose an adaptive TB adjustment strategy for highly automated driving vehicles. First, we propose metrics to evaluate drivers’ fatigue states and the relative positions of surrounding traffic. Second, a generalized additive model is established to predict take-over performance and accurately evaluate the influence of the aforementioned factors on take-over performance. Based on the model, we propose an adaptive adjustment strategy of the TB for take-over systems and demonstrate its effectiveness by a verification experiment. This study contributes to understanding the influence of drivers’ passive fatigue states, the relative positions of surrounding traffic, and the TB on drivers’ take-over performance as well as to the development of adaptive take-over systems for highly automated vehicles.

Cooperative driving of human driver and automated system can effectively reduce the necessity of extremely accurate environment perception of highly automated vehicles, and enhance the robustness of decision-making and motion control. However, due to the two players’ different intentions, severe conflicts may exist during the cooperation, which often result in negative consequences on driving safety and maneuverability. This paper presents an indirect shared control method to model the situation and improve the driving performance, which focus on the affine input nonlinear vehicle dynamic system for shared controller design under the framework of non-zero sum differential game. The Nash equilibria strategy indicates the best response for the automated system, which can guide the automated controller to act more safely and comfortably. Aimed to obtain fast solution for practical application, approximate dynamic programming is utilized to find the Nash equilibria, which is represented by deep neural networks and solved iteratively. Driver-in-the-loop tests on a driving simulator were conducted to verify the performance of the proposed method under highway driving scenarios. The results show that the designed controller is able to reduce the driving workload and ensure the driving safety.

The exponentially growing complexity of modern processors intensifies verification challenges. Traditional pre-silicon verification covers less and less of the design space, resulting in increasing post-silicon validation effort. A critical challenge is the manual debugging of intermittent failures on prototype chips, where multiple executions of a same test do not yield a consistent outcome. We leverage the power of machine learning to support automatic diagnosis of these difficult, inconsistent bugs. During post-silicon validation, lightweight hardware logs a compact measurement of observed signal activity over multiple executions of a same test: some may pass, somemay fail. Our novel algorithm applies anomaly detection techniques similar to those used to detect credit card fraud to identify the approximate cycle of a bug's occurrence and a set of candidate root-cause signals. Compared against other state-of-the-art solutions in this space, our new approach can locate the time of a bug's occurrence with nearly 4x better accuracy when applied to the complex OpenSPARC T2 design.

In this paper, we explore the challenges in scaling on-chip networks towards kilo-core processors. Current low-radix topologies optimize for fast local communication, but do not scale well to kilo-core systems because of the large number of routers required. These increase both power and hop count. In contrast, symmetric high-radix topologies optimize for global communication with fewer hop counts, but degrade local communication with their large, slow routers. To address both local and global communication optimizations independently, we decouple the interconnect design using asymmetric high-radix topologies. By setting a design goal of matching rauter speed with wire speed, our praposed topologies use fast medium-radix rauters to optimize for local communication and a few slow high-radix rauters that reduce hop count to optimize for global communication. Our asymmetric high-radix designs are enabled by recently praposed SwizzleSwitches, which allow us to achieve peiformance scalability within realistic power budgets. We prapose and evaluate two asymmetric high-radix topologies: Super-Star (asymmetric folded Clos) and Super-StarX (asymmetric folded Clos with superimposed mesh). Our evaluations show that the best performing asymmetric high-radix topology improves average network latency over a mesh by 45% while reducing the power consumption by 40%. When compared to symmetric high-radix topologies network thraughput is improved by 2.9× while still praviding similar latency benefits and power ejficiency.