The goal of Thrust Area #1 is the development of fundamental control and design tools to enhance the safety and performance of ground vehicles through modeling and computer simulation. This focus is partitioned into 1) modeling tool development for efficient, accurate robust control and design and 2) control system design. The techniques are applied to vehicle handling, steering, ride mobility, inter- or shared operability, active vehicle safety, power management control of hybrid systems including fuel cells. The evolving vision is to enhance the development of these systems as well as other less traditional vehicle systems using modeling and simulation tools that are effective and efficient in there use. Our plans to continue to apply its expertise to unmanned “robotic” type vehicles is also on point with this evolving vision.

The motivation for the first focus area, modeling tool development, is that the modeling and simulation process remains a greatly under-utilized tool for vehicle system design and control. This is because models are time consuming to develop, expensive to parameterize (statistically or otherwise), time consuming to solve (especially in optimal design scenarios), often difficult to integrate with models developed by others, difficult to quantify their accuracy and range of validity, and finally difficult to properly document.

The motivation for the second focus area, control system design, is the development of performance enhancing and safety enhancing systems with innovative control algorithms. These can only be developed if the models are first available (first focus area) and if suitable control synthesis techniques are developed. Hence, our goal is to create control system algorithms that can be efficiently and effective used by vehicles designers for improving vehicle performance.

Thrust Area Leader : Prof. Jeffrey L. Stein

Detailed project pages are being updated, only the lists of projects under each Thrust Area is available at the moment. Please check back later for the updated information.

Our Projects: