Grant: Alliance Grants

The automotive industry is in a transformational period of vehicle technology advancement. Significant progress in low-cost sensors, high processing power, and ubiquitous real-time information access are making vehicles safer and more intelligent, in turn providing better control and paving the way to fully automated driving. This unprecedented evolution in transferring human-centered decisions to machine-centered decisions increases reliance on algorithms to control vehicles, leading to significant concerns related to reliability, accuracy, health and safety. Today's Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) increase safety by reducing human error, but still require driver attention and interaction to transfer the system control and make decisions in cases of ambiguity. Rigorous diagnosis algorithms are essential for safe and robust performance of vehicle active safety systems and, more importantly, for fully automated driving systems. In current systems, the focus is on sensor and actuator fault detection and not on state estimation or control systems. The proposed research project will develop vehicle health monitoring systems that are critical to automated driving and ADAS which include accuracy and performance monitoring of safety critical estimation and control units, and powertrain systems. There are very limited works in health monitoring of estimation and control modules although they are critical in vehicles equipped with ADAS and automated driving in which driver's attention is not fully required. Any full or partial failure in electric powertrain could seriously endanger the safety of the vehicle for which a robust real-time monitoring is needed. This research will develop the necessary knowledge and technologies for practical and dependable automated driving technology in all conditions, making automated driving and overall road travel safer. This interdisciplinary research will provide a dynamic training environment, exposing students and engineers to a broad range of disciplines and technologies, as well as the opportunity to develop research skills with practical applications in the evolving Canadian transportation industry.