Real road vehicle tests are time consuming, laborious, and costly, and involve several safety concerns. Road vehicle motion simulators (RVMS) could assist with vehicle testing, and eliminate or reduce the difficulties traditionally associated with conducting vehicle tests. However, such simulators must exhibit a high level of fidelity and accuracy in order to provide realistic and reliable outcomes. In this paper, we review existing RVMS and discuss each of the major RVMS subsystems related to the research and development of vehicle dynamics. The possibility of utilising motion simulators to conduct ride and handling test scenarios is also investigated.

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) have shown indelible and revolutionary effects on accident reduction and more efficient use of travel time, with outstanding socio‐economic impact. Despite these benefits, to make AVs accepted by a wide demographic and produce them on an industrial scale with a reasonable price, there are still a number of technological and social challenges that need to be tackled. Path Tracking Controller (PTC) of AVs is one of the high potential subsystems that can be further improved in order to achieve more accurate, robust and comfortable tracking performance. This study provides a critical review and simulation study of several selected techniques used for the design of PTC of AVs. The AVs are assumed to have limited controllability due to non‐holonomic constraints, such as car‐like vehicles and differential drive mobile robots. A detailed discussion will be provided on the simulation outcomes as well as the pros and cons of each technique for the sake of implementation and improvement of state‐of‐the‐art PTC.

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Energy harvesting for wireless sensors and consumer electronic devices can significantly improve reliability and environmental sustainability of the devices. This is achieved by eliminating the dependency of these devices on rechargeable batteries, using clean and/or renewable energy sources. Energy harvesting from various energy sources is widely discussed among researchers and entrepreneurs, including harvesting energy from microscale phenomena. This topic is receiving increasing attention due to the rising numbers of low-power consumer electronic devices and wireless sensors, but also the increasing demand for more convenient and available devices. This article presents a feasibility study for an energy harvesting system based on a human’s breathing motion. The system is based on a modified pants belt that is integrated with an array of piezoelectric films and a harvesting circuit. The proposed energy harvester generates electricity from reciprocal abdominal motions of the human subject. In comparison with existing breathing-based energy harvesters, the proposed system allows for safe and convenient energy harvesting with no influence on the natural movement of the lungs. Stomach pressure analysis and measurement, as well as the design and simulations of the proposed harvester, are presented.

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Computational multibody system (MBS) method is a practical technique utilized for modeling, simulation, and optimization of mechanical systems. In the methodology of computational multibody system, equations of motion are derived, formulated, and solved through a systematic, generalized, and well-structured computational-mathematical approach. In this paper, the computational multibody system formulation, based on the appended Lagrangian method, is implemented to establish the governing equations of ride dynamics for a nonlinear ride model that represents a versatile half-car twotrack model of a road vehicle. The input to the system is a simulated road surface model based on the ISO road surface classification. The solution of the equation of motion is obtained using the direct integration approach along with constraint violation elimination and control techniques. Following the simulation, a time-domain multiobjective design optimization procedure is performed to improve the ride quality of the model. The ride quality comprises both ride comfort and ride safety. The optimization considers relevant objective functions including vibration isolation, suspension travel, road holding, and force index. The results of work show that the proposed method could acceptably estimate the optimal values of design variables for specific road classes and vehicle driving speeds. The simulation-based ride quality optimization performed here could facilitate improvement of suspension and tyre.