Introductory Chapter: The Dynamics of Vehicles – Basics, Simulation and Autonomous Systems

1. Introduction

Today, developments in the transportation sector are progressing in a huge promoting way. Our mechanized transportation vehicles that we started to use 200 years ago has made our lives easier with their counterparts produced for different functions and purposes.

Vehicles are transportation fixtures with complex engineering features. All of them have their own production types, usage areas, types, and sizes. Totally, all of them are in the production area and during usage are made to reach the driver or users from one point to another.

This is undoubtedly that one of the important arguments of vehicle engineering is movement direction. How the functions will correspond to the commands that are requested from the tool should be done as classified in a teaching department. The name of this branch of science is “vehicle dynamics.”

When it comes to vehicle dynamics, the first thing that comes to mind is that it is the issue of how to calculate the forces on the vehicle while it is in motion and how to calculate the energy required for this motion to occur. Although vehicle dynamism is calculated in different ways for different transportation types (air, land, sea, and space) it serves two main purposes:

1. How the driver/user’s commands/requests will be executed by the vehicle.

2. It is how safe and comfortable driving should continue while these commands are being carried out.

Consequently, much of the studies that are carried out for many years relating to conceptual and mathematical equations are associated with vehicle dynamics and have been created for all kinds of vehicles and started to be used on real vehicles. All this mixture of equations of motion realized by the basic requirements of physics and the mathematics of motion mechanisms are available to the driver.

Vehicles are not just about engines (internal combustion, electric, etc.) which are energy sources. Besides working with complex mechanical processes in engines, the main purpose is about how the motion energy from the engines will provide the movement of the vehicle.

According to reachable open literature, there are important parts in vehicle dynamics that must be found, calculated, and manufactured accordingly. These parts play a very essential and key role in the movement of the vehicle. Brakes, suspensions, wheels, wings, aerodynamic structure, steering, driver support systems, and many more parts formed the basis of vehicle dynamics.

2. Discussion

For the last 20 years, production strategies and product diversity, especially in vehicles used in land transportation, are constantly developing and renewed in line with the wishes of its users. Undoubtedly, technological development, human factor, environmental factor, and necessity factor have an important place in this renewal.

The safety and driver-assisted security processes of the vehicles play an active role in the production of electromobility and semiartificial intelligence vehicles. Although the transition to the fifth phase (fully autonomous vehicles: fully automatic vehicles without any interference from the driver) is ongoing, it still has some more time to fully develop. However, fourth phase is active in most vehicles.

The vehicle dynamics concerned details and the development process is roughly illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

An illustrated figure on vehicle dynamics (photos taken from Google Images).

Nearly 90% of traffic accidents in the world are due to driver’s fault [1]. Therefore, to support/assist the drivers vehicles are integrated with driver-assistance devices and systems. These systems are developed in such a way that they can perform instant analysis and react with a control unit. The phenomenon of “assistant” that started with ABS and ESC has taken a highly developed form with new technologies. In an example as is illustrated in Figure 2 shows the driving assistance systems of the Audi A7 concept.

Figure 2.

Audi RS7 driver assistance system (Audi, faithfully to original, by [2]).

Most of these support systems are produced to increase the interaction of the driver with the vehicle and to achieve a safe and comfortable riding more easily. Hundreds of hours of simulation and practical experiments are carried out under these productions. After these trials, the optimized systems become systems that are manufactured and coupled to the vehicle. In engineering applications, before creating a product, it is inevitable to create an analysis with simulation and programming. The math behind this procedure is done with basic vehicle dynamics math. Mathematical calculations of different organs and major case studies can be found in Refs. [3, 4].

More autonomous driving and driverless operations of such vehicles starting to run in the coming years. Certain companies (Google, Tesla, etc.) continue to work and try on autonomous vehicles.

The system components and sensor design of an autonomous vehicle is shown in Figure 3 [5].

Figure 3.

The system components and sensor design of an autonomous vehicle [5].

3. Conclusion

As a general result, this study’s aim is to create a special book to explain the importance of vehicle dynamics, which has an important place in the automotive and vehicle world and to direct more attention to autonomous vehicles.

The book chapters were created by experts in their fields and blended with the aim of both vehicle dynamics and modeling, testing, and modeling in different vehicles, and presenting the main information.

This book presents to the readers crucial phenomenon about the autonomous vehicles of the future and how important the vehicle dynamics is.

Conflict of interest

“The author declares no conflict of interest.”