Energy efficiency of autonomous vehicles on hilly roads

Abstract

Abstract Energy efficiency is traditionally among the main development trends in the automobile industry. We suspected that intelligent speed control systems can provide economic and ecological benefits for implementing civil autonomous driving technologies. We introduced the approach for autonomous driving, which is based on the analysis of the precise Digital Terrain Model (DTM) and optimal vehicle control actions with respect to a requested transport task, which can be a task of fuel or energy economy in this particular case. We addressed the research question of fuel economy estimation with respect to the reference parameter that is applicable to compare different control algorithms. We demonstrated the use of roadway-related factors of DTM to affect fuel consumption. We contributed the algorithm for saving fuel while driving on a hilly road and examined the influence of vehicle load on possible economy values. We compared fuel and energy-saving values of gasoline and electric vehicles based on the same chassis with and without use of the proposed algorithm. Practical results of tests on public roads are presented.