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In open-pit mining, autonomous trucks are essential for enhancing both safety and productivity. Object detection technology is critical to their smooth and secure operation, but training these models requires large amounts of high-quality annotated data representing various conditions. It is expensive and time-consuming to collect these data during open-pit mining due to the harsh environmental conditions. Simulation engines have emerged as an effective alternative, generating diverse labeled data to augment real-world datasets. However, discrepancies between simulated and real-world environments, often referred to as the Sim2Real domain shift, reduce model performance. This study addresses these challenges by presenting a novel semi-supervised domain adaptation for object detection (SSDA-OD) framework named Adamix, which is designed to reduce domain shift, enhance object detection, and minimize labeling costs. Adamix builds on a mean teacher architecture and introduces two key modules: progressive intermediate domain construction (PIDC) and warm-start adaptive pseudo-label (WSAPL). PIDC builds intermediate domains using a mixup strategy to reduce source domain bias and prevent overfitting, while WSAPL provides adaptive thresholds for pseudo-labeling, mitigating false and missed detections during training. When evaluated in a Sim2Real scenario, Adamix shows superior domain adaptation performance, achieving a higher mean average precision (mAP) compared with state-of-the-art methods, with 50% less labeled data required, achieved through active learning. The results demonstrate that Adamix significantly reduces dependence on costly real-world data collection, offering a more efficient solution for object detection in challenging open-pit mining environments.

A truck platoon is a set of virtually linked trucks that travel in tandem with small intervehicle distances. Several studies have proved that traveling in platoons can significantly improve fuel economy due to the reduced aerodynamic drag. However, most literature only provides scattered pieces of information regarding fuel economy in truck platoons. Therefore, a literature survey is needed to understand what has been studied and what problems remain to be further addressed. This paper presents an overview of existing studies to illustrate the state of the art about fuel savings for truck platooning. Specifically, it summarized the methodologies, the contributing factors of fuel consumption, the coordination methods to improve the platooning rate, and the look-ahead control strategies to generate fuel-efficient speed profiles for each vehicle driving in a platoon over different road grades. After that, the autonomous truck platooning was introduced, and we raised and discussed a couple of outstanding questions to be addressed in future work.

Automation is one of the hottest topics in transportation research and could yield completely driverless cars in less than a decade.

Plenty of studies on exclusive lanes for Connected and Autonomous Vehicle (CAV) have been conducted recently about traffic efficiency and safety. However, most of the previous research studies neglected comprehensive consideration of the safety impact on different market penetration rates (MPRs) of CAVs, traffic demands, and proportion of trucks in mixture CAVs with human’s driven vehicle environment. On this basis, this study is to (1) identify the safety impact on exclusive lanes for CAVs under different MPRs with different traffic demands and (2) investigate the safety impact of trucks for CAV exclusive lanes on mixture environment. Based on the Intelligent Driver Model (IDM), a CAV platooning control algorithm is proposed for modeling the driving behaviors of CAVs. A calibrated 7-kilometer freeway section microscopic simulation environment is built by VISSIM. Four surrogate safety measures, including both longitudinal and lateral safety risk indexes, are employed to evaluate the overall safety impacts of setting exclusive lanes. Main results indicate that (1) setting one exclusive lane is capable to improve overall safety environment in low demand, and two exclusive lanes are more suitable for high-demand scenario; (2) existence of trucks worsens overall longitudinal safety environment, and improper setting of exclusive lanes in high trucks, low MPR scenario has adverse effect on longitudinal safety; and (3) setting exclusive lanes have better longitudinal and lateral safety improvement in high-truck proportion scenarios. Setting one or two exclusive lanes led to [+42.4% to −52.90%] and [+45.7% to −55.2%] of longitudinal risks while [−1.8% to −87.1%] and [−2.1% to −85.3%] of lateral conflicts compared with the base scenario, respectively. Results of this study provide useful insight for the setting of exclusive lanes for CAVs in a mixture environment.

Recently, in various fields, research into the path tracking of autonomous vehicles and automated guided vehicles has been conducted to improve worker safety, convenience, and work efficiency. For path tracking of various systems applied to autonomous driving technology, it is necessary to recognize the surrounding environment, determine technology accordingly, and develop control methods. Various sensors and artificial-intelligence-based perception methods have limitations in that they must learn a large amount of data. Therefore, a particle-filter-based path tracking algorithm using a monocular camera was used for the recognition of target RGB. The path tracking errors were calculated and a linear-quadratic-regulator-based desired steering angle were derived. The autonomous trucks were steered and driven using a pulse-width-modulation-based steering and driving motor. Based on an autonomous truck with a single steering and driving module, it was verified that the path tracking could be used in three evaluation scenarios. To compare the LQR-based path tracking control performance proposed in this paper, an elliptical path tracking scenario using a conventional sliding mode control with robust control performance was performed. The results show that the RMS of the lateral preview error of the SMC was approximately 18% larger than that of the LQR-based method.

Off-road driving operations can be a challenging environment for human conductors as they are subject to accidents, repetitive and tedious tasks, strong vibrations, which may affect their health in the long term. Therefore, they can benefit from a successful implementation of autonomous vehicle technology, improving safety, reducing labor costs and fuel consumption, and increasing operational efficiency. The main contribution of this paper is the experimental validation of a path tracking control strategy, composed of longitudinal and lateral controllers, on an off-road scenario with a fully loaded heavy-duty truck. The longitudinal control strategy relies on a nonlinear model predictive controller, which considers the path geometry and simplified vehicle dynamics to compute a smooth and comfortable input velocity, without violating the imposed constraints. The lateral controller is based on a robust linear quadratic regulator, which considers a vehicle model subject to parametric uncertainties to minimize its lateral displacement and heading error, as well as ensure stability. Experiments were carried out using a fully loaded vehicle on unpaved roads in an open-pit mine. The truck followed the reference path within the imposed constraints, showing robustness and driving smoothness.

The Japanese logistics industry has been actively researching and developing autonomous trucks to address challenges such as truck driver shortages and increasing transportation demands. In particular, infrastructure-coordinated autonomous driving has gained attention, leading to the development of systems that assist merging by providing real-time information on mainline vehicles to automated trucks via sensors installed at merging points. This approach is expected to reduce traffic congestion and enhance safety during merging. In this study, we propose a merging control algorithm that integrates path-following control based on optimal control theory with infrastructure coordination to facilitate the merging of automated trucks and optimize traffic flow. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm ensures highly accurate path following, improves the merging success rate, and reduces merging start time.

The evaluation of driver workload in the lead vehicle of a driver-following autonomous truck platoon was conducted using bio-signal analysis. In this study, a single driver operated the lead vehicle while the second and third trucks followed autonomously. Three professional truck drivers (38 ± 4 years old, male) participated in the experiment. During driving, wearable sensors measured heart-rate variability indices, body acceleration, and skin temperature. The heart rate and body acceleration were sampled at 128 Hz (7.8 ms intervals), while skin temperature was recorded at 1 Hz. Each participant underwent three measurement sessions on different days, with each session lasting approximately 30–40 min. Statistical analysis was performed using repeated-measures ANOVA to determine significant differences across conditions and days. The results indicated that compared to solo driving, driving the lead vehicle of the autonomous platoon significantly increased skin temperature (p < 0.001), suggesting a higher physiological workload. This study provides insight into the physiological impact of autonomous platooning on lead-vehicle drivers, which is crucial for developing strategies to mitigate driver workload in such systems.

With low-level vehicle automation already available, there is a necessity to estimate its effects on traffic flow, especially if these could be negative. A long gradual transition will occur from manual driving to automated driving, in which many yet unknown traffic flow dynamics will be present. These effects have the potential to increasingly aid or cripple current road networks. In this contribution, we investigate these effects using an empirically calibrated and validated simulation experiment, backed up with findings from literature. We found that low-level automated vehicles in mixed traffic will initially have a small negative effect on traffic flow and road capacities. The experiment further showed that any improvement in traffic flow will only be seen at penetration rates above 70%. Also, the capacity drop appeared to be slightly higher with the presence of low-level automated vehicles. The experiment further investigated the effect of bottleneck severity and truck shares on traffic flow. Improvements to current traffic models are recommended and should include a greater detail and understanding of driver-vehicle interaction, both in conventional and in mixed traffic flow. Further research into behavioural shifts in driving is also recommended due to limited data and knowledge of these dynamics.