This paper presents a method for extraction and recognition of trucks from aerial photographs. A new method, mean shift image segmentation, is employed to extract truck shadow and boundary information. After a conversion of the boundaries into vector data, an enclosing minimum area rectangle is fit to each boundary. These rectangles are input as candidates into a designed Hopfield Neural Networ...

A method to improve model based diagnosis for the air path of a truck engine is presented. Originally, inaccuracies in both the volumetric efficiency static model and sensors limited the diagnosis performances. Statistical charts built from truck operational data were tested in order to reduce the overall residual dispersion. Data taken from two different trucks working in various operating con...

This paper investigates development of power management strategies tailored specifically to a medium truck with parallel hydraulic hybrid powertrain. The hydraulic hybrid vehicle (HHV) system is modeled in MATLAB/SIMULINK environment. As the starting point, this study considers rule-based power management strategy adopted from the previous HEV study. Dynamic Programming (DP) algorithm is used t...

Light-duty truck classification allows manufacturers and owners to avoid a host of passenger-car regulations, including gas-guzzler taxes, safety standards, and more stringent emissions and fueleconomy standards. This paper describes the distinct policies that govern light duty trucks and passenger cars, evaluates the emissions, safety, and fuel economy differences that have resulted, and inves...

The feasibility of several alternatives to long-haul truck idling are investigated. Battery Powered systems (BPS) where batteries are charged off the alternator is considered. Moreover, BPSs with various battery types are compared to determine which one would have the greatest impact on the fuel consumption and overall performance. In addition, applicability of thermal energy storage (TES) is s...

In this paper, we describe a new framework to combine experts’ judgments for the prevention of driving risks in a cabin truck. In addition, the methodology shows how to choose among the experts the one whose predictions fit best the environmental conditions. The methodology is applied over data sets obtained from a high immersive cabin truck simulator in natural driving conditions. A nonp...

Based on Coroners' verdicts, fatigue of car or truck drivers was a contributing factor in 9.1% of fatal accidents involving trucks. Based on the presence of factors such as extended driving hours, falling asleep at the wheel, comments about tiredness, driving right of centre and night-time driving, the authors estimated fatigue contributed to 19.9% of the accidents. There were approximately equ...

Computer simulations are widely used in the truck industry in order to provide assistance in the product development. Bolt joints are common in trucks. A bolt fracture usually has a great influence on how a truck structure will behave in a crash. Therefore, when simulating truck crashes it is important to be able to predict when bolt fracture occurs. A material model for 10.9 bolts has been cal...

Providing long distance truck drivers with adequate access to prevention, testing, and treatment services for HIV, Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs), Tuberculosis (TB), and Malaria is suggested to be an extremely effective way to reduce the burden and the spread of these diseases. However, truck drivers need to overcome large barriers in order to obtain these services at the traditional he...

Fuzzy control systems and neural-network control systems for backing up a simulated truck, and truck-and-trailer, to a loading dock in a parking lot are presented. The supervised backpropagation learning algorithm trained the neural network systems. The robustness of the neural systems was tested by removing random subsets of training data in learning sequences. The neural systems performed wel...