This Feature Topic brings together experts from the industry and academia to discuss the progress of the latest works on cyber-attack detection and resilient control of ICVs. In this Feature Topic, we have selected four papers among dozens of submissions to showcase the latest research progress. The highlights of these papers are introduced as follows.

The advanced and personalised experience that modern cars offer makes them more and more data-hungry. For example, the cabin preferences of the possible drivers must be recorded and associated to some identity, while such data could be exploited to deduce sensitive information about the driver’s health. Therefore, drivers’ privacy must be taken seriously, requiring a dedicated risk assessment framework, as presented in this paper through a double assessment combining the asset-oriented ISO approach with the threat-oriented STRIDE approach. The framework is tailored to the level of specific car brand and demonstrated on the ten top-selling brands as well as, due to its innovative character, Tesla. The two approaches yield different, but complementary findings, demonstrating the additional insights gained through their parallel adoption.

The detection and mitigation of cyber-attacks in connected vehicle systems (CVSs) are critical for ensuring the security of
intelligent connected vehicles. This paper presents a solution to estimate sensor and actuator cyber-attacks in CVSs. A novel
method is proposed that utilizes an augmented system representation technique and a nonlinear unknown input observer
(UIO) to achieve asymptotic estimation of both CVS dynamics and cyber-attacks. The nonlinear CVS dynamics is represented
in a Takagi–Sugeno (TS) fuzzy form with nonlinear consequents, which allows for the effective use of the differential mean
value theorem to handle unmeasured premise variables. Furthermore, via Lyapunov stability theory sufficient conditions are
proposed, expressed in terms of linear matrix inequalities, to design TS fuzzy UIO. Several test scenarios are performed with
high-fidelity Simulink-CarSim co-simulations to show the effectiveness of the proposed cyber-attack estimation method.

Cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) is an important technology for improving road utilization and energy efficiency
in the automotive industry. In CACC systems, connected vehicles can receive information from adjacent ones through communication networks. However, the networks are vulnerable to cyber-attacks, so the states of vehicles cannot be received promptly and accurately. This paper studies the security resilience control for a CACC system subject to denial of service (DoS) attack. The core of the proposed resilient control strategy is to estimate the delay caused by DoS attack and then compensate for it in the controller. Specifically, a CACC system is modeled by considering the impacts of DoS attack on the transmitted data. Then, a high-gain observer is presented to estimate the vehicle states including the time delay. The convergence of the observer is proved in a theorem based on the Lyapunov stability theory, and the high-gain-velocity observer is modified so that the estimation error of the velocity can converge to zero in a finite time. A resilient controller is designed by proposing a time delay compensation algorithm to mitigate the impacts of DoS attack. The effectiveness of the estimation and control methods is illustrated by a ten-vehicle simulation system operating at the FTP75 driving cycle conditions. And the relative estimation errors are less than 6%.

The state-of-the-art deep neural networks are vulnerable to the attacks of adversarial examples with small-magnitude perturbations. In the field of deep-learning-based automated driving, such adversarial attack threats testify to the weakness of AI models. This limitation can lead to severe issues regarding the safety of the intended functionality (SOTIF) in automated driving. From the perspective of causality, the adversarial attacks can be regarded as confounding effects with spurious correlations established by the non-causal features. However, few previous research works are devoted to building the relationship between adversarial examples, causality, and SOTIF. This paper proposes a robust physical adversarial perturbation generation method that aims at the salient image regions of the targeted attack class with the guidance of class activation mapping (CAM). With the utilization of CAM, the maximization of the confounding effects can be achieved through the intermediate variable of the front-door criterion between images and targeted attack labels. In the simulation experiment, the proposed method achieved a 94.6% targeted attack success rate (ASR) on the released dataset when the speed-speed-limit-60 km/h (speed-limit-60) signs could be attacked as speed-speed-limit-80 km/h (speed-limit-80) signs. In the real physical experiment, the targeted ASR is 75% and the untargeted ASR is 100%. Besides the state-of-the-art attack result, a detailed experiment is implemented to evaluate the performance of the proposed method under low resolutions, diverse optimizers, and multifarious defense methods. The code and data are released at the repository: https:// github. com/ yebin 999/ rp2- with- cam.

This study aims at developing an optimization framework for electric vehicle charging by considering different trade-offs
between battery degradation and charging time. For the first time, the application of practical limitations on charging and
cooling power is considered along with more detailed health models. Lithium iron phosphate battery is used as a case study
to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed optimization framework. A coupled electro-thermal equivalent circuit model
is used along with two battery health models to mathematically obtain optimal charging current profiles by considering stress factors of state-of-charge, charging rate, temperature and time. The optimization results demonstrate an improvement over the benchmark constant current–constant voltage (CCCV) charging protocol when considering both the charging time and battery health. A main difference between the optimal and the CCCV charging protocols is found to be an additional ability to apply constraints and adapt to initial conditions in the proposed optimal charging protocol. In a case study, for example, the ‘optimal time’ charging is found to take 12 min while the ‘optimal health’ charging profile suggests around 100 min for charging the battery from 25 to 75% state-of-charge. Any other trade-off between those two extreme cases is achievable using the proposed charging protocol as well.

Automated valet parking (AVP) has attracted the attention of industry and academia in recent years. However, there are
still many challenges to be solved, including shortest path search, optimal time efficiency, and applicability of algorithm in
complex scenarios. In this paper, a hierarchical AVP path planner is proposed, which divides a complete AVP path planning
into the guided layer and the planning layer from the perspective of global decision-making. The guided layer is mainly
used to divide a complex AVP path planning into several simple path plannings, which makes the hybrid A* algorithm more
applicable in a complex parking environment. The planning layer mainly adopts different optimization methods for driving
and parking path planning. The proposed method is verified by a large number of simulations which include the verification
of the optimal parking position, the performance of the planner for perpendicular parking, and the scalability of the planner
for parallel parking and inclined parking. The simulation results reveal that the efficiency of the algorithm is increased by
more than 20 times, and the average path length is also shortened by more than 20%. Furthermore, the planner overcomes
the problem that the hybrid A* algorithm is not applicable in complex parking scenarios.

An objective evaluation scheme for automotive technical and comprehensive performance could provide critical and instructive insights for academic research, engineering practice, and commercial marketing of vehicles. In this paper, the technical performance index A = S∕(T1 ? T2)(m∕(s2 ? L)) and comprehensive performance index F = M ? S∕(T1 ? T2), (kN ? L?1, where M is the vehicle mass) are formulated by incorporating the vehicle 0–100 km ? h?1 acceleration duration T1, 100–0 km ? h?1 braking duration T2, and fuel economy S (mileage per liter fuel at constant speed) to assess the vehicle’s longitudinal dynamic performance. A and F offer a clear physical implication of a vehicle’s acceleration capability and traction efficiency acquired per unit of fuel consumption, respectively. These indexes are used for wide case studies of popular market sedans and SUVs of joint ventures (JVs) and domestic brands in China over the last 17 years. The findings prove that this approach could be effectively and reliably utilized for the objective evaluation and analysis of the technical and comprehensive performance of automotive models.

Convective heat transfer plays an important role in the development of a high-performance battery cell. Electric vehicles
carry a large amount of the battery cells to reach a longer range of endurance mileage. Thermal diffusion around the battery
cells can be considered as obstacles to improve the convective heat transfer coefficient. In this paper, a novel agitator taking
advantage of strong vortices is designed to disrupt the thermal boundary layer around the battery cells, thereby improving
the fluid mixing for enhanced convective heat transfer. A fluid–structure interaction algorithm is developed to simulate the
convective heat transfer rate at various flapping motion. Under the comparison with clean channel, the vortex-induced vibration by the agitated beam can increase the average Nusselt number by 119.59%. This research can be applied to optimize the thermal-structure design inside the electric vehicle battery.

Electric vehicles are developing prosperously in recent years. Lithium-ion batteries have become the dominant energy storage device in electric vehicle application because of its advantages such as high power density and long cycle life. To ensure safe and efficient battery operations and to enable timely battery system maintenance, accurate and reliable detection and diagnosis of battery faults are necessitated. In this paper, the state-of-the-art battery fault diagnosis methods are comprehensively reviewed. First, the degradation and fault mechanisms are analyzed and common abnormal behaviors are summarized. Then, the fault diagnosis methods are categorized into the statistical analysis-, model-, signal processing-, and data-driven methods. Their distinctive characteristics and applications are summarized and compared. Finally, the challenges facing the existing fault diagnosis methods are discussed and the future research directions are pointed out.

Estimating depth from images captured by camera sensors is crucial for the advancement of autonomous driving technologies and has gained significant attention in recent years. However, most previous methods rely on stacked pooling or stride convolution to extract high-level features, which can limit network performance and lead to information redundancy. This paper proposes an improved bidirectional feature pyramid module (BiFPN) and a channel attention module (Seblock: squeeze and excitation) to address these issues in existing methods based on monocular camera sensor. The Seblock redistributes channel feature weights to enhance useful information, while the improved BiFPN facilitates efficient fusion of multi-scale features. The proposed method is in an end-to-end solution without any additional post-processing, resulting in efficient depth estimation. Experiment results show that the proposed method is competitive with state-of-the-art algorithms and preserves fine-grained texture of scene depth.

Safe and smooth interaction between other vehicles is one of the ultimate goals of driving automation. However, recent
reports of demonstrative deployments of automated vehicles (AVs) indicate that AVs are still difficult to meet the expectation of other interacting drivers, which leads to several AV accidents involving human-driven vehicles (HVs) without the
understanding about the dynamic interaction process. By investigating 4300 video clips of traffic accidents, it is found that
the limited dynamic visual field of drivers is one leading factor in inter-vehicle interaction accidents. A game-theoretic
decision algorithm considering social compatibility is proposed to handle the interaction with a human-driven truck at an
unsignalized intersection. Starting from a probabilistic model for the visual field characteristics of truck drivers, social fitness and reciprocal altruism in the decision are incorporated in the game payoff design. Human-in-the-loop experiments
are carried out, in which 24 subjects are invited to drive and interact with AVs deployed with the proposed algorithm and
two comparison algorithms. Totally, 207 cases of intersection interactions are obtained and analyzed, which shows that
the proposed decision-making algorithm can improve both safety and time efficiency, and make AV decisions more in line
with the expectation of interacting human drivers. These findings can help inform the design of automated driving decision
algorithms, to ensure that AVs can be safely and efficiently integrated into the human-dominated traffic.