How does the vehicle control system VCU make cars smarter?

The growth of new energy vehicles and Internet vehicles in the past two years is obvious to all. From a long-term perspective, this is also the trend of automobile development. Compared with traditional vehicles, new energy vehicles are more inclined to the Internet and intelligence, and the excellent operating experience they bring is beyond the reach of traditional vehicles. Most of this operating experience is attributed to one of the cores of the vehicle-VCU (Complete Vehicle Control System).

The vehicle control system can realize the adjustment and optimization of vehicle power, comfort, safety, and energy consumption. With big data, the vehicle has better operability and reliability.

Buer Technology is an automotive big data solution provider, and its main business is the electric vehicle control system VCU. Boer Technology CEO Yan Fangchao introduced to Leifeng.com the application of vehicle control systems and big data in electric vehicles.

Automatic calibration and data mining in research and development

In fact, VCU is the control core of new vehicles such as the Internet and electric vehicles, and there is little demand for traditional vehicles. The research and development of new cars is different from traditional cars.

In the development process of electric vehicles, there are usually several stages:

• The first stage: virtual simulation stage. At this stage, there is no physical car. All the testing and R&D work uses software to simulate and test. After a series of tests are qualified, the hardware test can be entered.
• The second stage: hardware simulation. There is still no physical car at this stage, but some hardware has been used at the time of testing. For example, if you want a motor, you will buy a motor and place it in the laboratory, and use the control equipment to verify the control algorithm.
• The third stage: bench test. This stage basically has the prototype of the car, but it is only tested in the laboratory. This stage is divided into two steps. In the first test, all the required parts are assembled on the bench for virtual testing. The second step will be to make a prototype car, and do batch trial production tests, etc.
• The final stage: Carry out the three-high test (high temperature, high pressure and high cold) on the car, and then calibrate the various data. After the entire test is completed, the design phase is basically finalized.

The data obtained through the preliminary simulation test is generally more accurate, and the success rate of the later prototype test will be much higher.

In addition, Yan Fangchao told Lei Feng.com that there is a calibration process after the car is formed. Calibration means that after the control program is changed, the engineer will also determine the “motor speed” based on experience and laboratory parameters during actual operation. Data such as, current size” and other data are manually improved. Among them, the parameters are very large, usually as many as thousands, and the workload of manual modification is very cumbersome. Therefore, they independently developed an automatic calibration platform for this purpose, which greatly saved the workload. The accuracy is also high. This kind of calibration process can also make the car run more energy-saving through data collection and mining. This is also a benefit of integrating big data in the research and development process.

Driving safety protection

In traditional cars, the data of various cars is mostly displayed on the dashboard, while Internet cars have large LCD screens to display this information. However, if the vehicle is in a situation, the user can only see some parameters on the LCD screen. To show the user the potential dangers of the vehicle.

Yan Fangchao said that the benefits of the combination of vehicle control system and big data on driving safety are roughly in two points.

• 1. When the car breaks down, the VCU can know the details of the failure and make predictions: “can the car be driven”, “will there be further damage”, “needs rescue or can continue to drive to repair the car” Factory”, “Which part needs to be repaired when repairing” and so on.
• 2. Faults can be predicted. The system can collect various sensor parameters, driver operating parameters, vehicle operating parameters, real-time road congestion parameters, and so on. These data will be uploaded to the background and analyzed and summarized through big data algorithms. When the law is applied to cars that do not occur, it can effectively predict the failure of some cars.

Speaking of this, Yan Fangchao also gave an example:

When a major earthquake occurs in a place, frogs will suddenly jump on the road in groups, and other animals will also have some abnormal behaviors. At this time, people can judge that there will be a disaster. This is the application of the law, and the role of the law data on the car is the same, but the regularity of the car failure is stronger, so the accuracy of the prediction is stronger. At present, Buer Technology has accumulated tens of millions of big data for vehicle failure analysis, and vehicle owners and manufacturers can see the real-time safe state of each vehicle.

In addition to the protection in the above examples, VCU has corresponding data for protection predictions in the driving state safety confirmation (for example, the vehicle is not allowed to jump directly from the forward mode to the reverse mode), communication failure protection, battery protection, and thermal management, etc. .

Comfort and energy consumption

In addition to safety, new energy vehicles are more comfortable and easy to operate than traditional vehicles.

Internet cars have added Internet factors, and there are corresponding algorithms in the vehicle controller, battery, motor management system, and various sensors, making the vehicle more intelligent. But the control program itself will inevitably have BUG, ​​so to improve the control and comfort, some big data support is needed. This support is reflected in the power, various mode management and user management of car needs.

Give a simple example:

The vehicle control system will recognize your location and real-time road conditions, and use cloud data analysis to determine the power mode you currently need. The power mode used by country roads and highways, unobstructed streets and congested roads is different. At this time, the vehicle control system can switch the power mode.

In addition, power mode switching can also be manifested in another scenario. For example, when a car is full of passengers and empty, the starting and accelerating operations will bring different operating feelings to the driver. Throttle dynamics can make a difference. Adjusting the car through the VCU can make the driver feel unified. Regardless of the vehicle’s load or not, as long as the accelerator is stepped on to the corresponding depth, the same acceleration power can be obtained

compatibility

In terms of compatibility, VCU’s software and hardware can be configured.

Yan Fangchao told Leifeng.com that taking the control system of Boolean Technology as an example, all its interfaces are optional and support various sensors and control equipment from other manufacturers.

“It’s like going to a computer store to equip computers, all kinds of hardware are compatible.”

In addition to hardware, it is also configurable in software. Yan Fangchao said that their control system does not need to be re-programmed to improve the control algorithm and so on. It only needs to find the corresponding configuration file and download it to the system list for configuration and modification. That is, it can be customized by the user, saving the trouble of code modification and testing.

Yan Fangchao said that according to the current development of automobiles, the popularity of Internet vehicles and autonomous driving is not very high, but the Internet and intelligence of electric vehicles are relatively strong, so Buer Technology uses electric vehicles as the starting point to study VCU . In the future unmanned cars and Internet cars, the vehicle control system will be improved more and play a greater role.