Energy Efficient Maneuvering of Connected and Automated Vehicles

Onboard sensing and external connectivity using Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V), Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) and Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) technologies allows a vehicle to "know" its future operating environment with some degree of certainty, greatly narrowing prior information gaps. The increased development of such connected and automated vehicle systems, currently used mostly for safety and driver convenience, presents new opportunities to improve the energy efficiency of individual vehicles [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in collaboration with Toyota Motor North America and University of Michigan is currently working on improving energy consumption of a Toyota Prius Prime 2017 by 20%. This paper will provide an overview of the various algorithms that are being developed to achieve the energy consumption target. Custom tools such as a traffic simulator was built to model traffic flow in Fort Worth, Texas with sufficient accuracy. The benefits of a traffic simulator are two-fold: (1) generation of repeatable traffic flow patterns and (2) evaluation of the robustness of control algorithms by introducing disturbances. The traffic simulator is integrated with a high-precision hub dynamometer for testing the various control algorithms in a controlled environment. Vehicle testing results from the hub dynamometer is presented.