Abstract:

The Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) is crucial for improving driving performance for road vehicles, but it is not available for off-road vehicles due to limited information available through onboard sensors. Off-road terrain faces challenges in ensuring driving safety due to poor road conditions. This paper proposes an online predictive eco-driving strategy, which includes a safety supervisory module, time reference generator, and rolling optimization. The safety supervisory module analyzes vehicle stability performance under different road conditions, ensuring driving safety on low adhesion coefficient, high curvature, and heavy grade off-road terrain. The time reference generator ensures vehicle mobility with a prior knowledge of distance to destination, generating reference time quickly and effectively. Model predictive control is employed to construct the multi-objective eco-driving problem, with particle swarm optimization to minimize fuel consumption while tracking reference time and ensuring driving safety. Simulations show that the proposed strategy can improve fuel economy and vehicle mobility by 10.13% and 5.77% over the practical strategy, respectively, under a 5 km off-road terrain scenario.