In certain driving situations, indirect viewing systems can support drivers when the drivers field of view is restricted. For some special vehicles, by applying indirect vision driving system, drivers could be protected from the dangerous working environment. In four experiments, we measured drivers task performance, workload and fatigue in different viewing systems. The image parameters considered here are camera lens field of view (FOV), image magnification factor and camera viewpoint. The results indicate that larger driver's field of vision causes greater driving fatigue while a smaller image magnification factor could reduce the drivers fatigue. Besides, the differences between eye point and camera viewpoint wont cause driver extra fatigue, but will result errors in the estimation of lateral and longitudinal position. In addition, the participants drove the course faster with natural vision than they did with the indirect vision systems. A smaller image magnification factor can improve the drivers task performance.

With a classical 4 degrees of freedom linear dynamic model of vehicle-trailer system in the yaw plane, preliminary study on lateral stability is carried out by means of analyzing systems damping ratio. The results show that structural parameters have important influence on lateral stability of vehicle-trailer system. Based on that study, a concept of critical velocity with zero damping ratio as an index is present. With the help of MSC.ADAMS, a multi-body dynamic model of a real vehicle-trailer system is built subsequently and the dynamic responses of vehicle-trailer system running on flat road and rough road is simulated respectively. The simulation results indicated that the characteristics of lateral stability of both of the linear dynamic model and the multi-body dynamic model running on flat road are similar. The critical velocity of multi-body dynamic model running on rough road decreases due to the disturbance from road. Since effects of road, nonlinear wheels, suspension structure and load transfer are taken into consideration, multi-body dynamic model of vehicle-trailer system running on the rough road could be more perfectly characterizing the lateral stability of vehicle-trailer system.

Planetary gear train systems are widely used in automotive transmissions due to their compactness, large reduction ratios and degrees of freedom available for the selection of gear ratios. The analysis of gear ratios and torque relations among the elements of a planetary train system is often difficult due to the complexity of the planetary train structure. This is especially the case for automotive transmissions using planetary train system where the members for input and output and the members that are fixed or interconnected must be changed in the clutch engagement schedule to obtain multiple transmission speeds. This paper proposes a systematic approach that simplifies the gear ratio and torque analysis based on the basic planetary train characteristics. The approach can be effectively used for the analysis of gear ratio and static torques for power transmissions consisting of parallel planetary trains. A case study of multi-speed automotive transmission based on the approach is included in the paper.