Prediction of Drag Force on Vehicles in a Platoon Configuration Using Machine Learning

Machine learning is used for extraction of valuable information from data thus helping in exploration of hidden patterns, leading to learning models that can be used for prediction. In the domain of autonomous vehicles machine learning techniques have been applied in several areas, vehicle platooning being one of them. Vehicle platooning is a vital feature of automated highways which provides the key benefits of fuel economy, road safety and environmental protection coupled with safe road transportation. However, high computational cost associated with the numerical simulation of vehicle aerodynamics makes the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) study of vehicle platoon prohibitively expensive and complex. Machine learning, with its high predictive power, has emerged as a promising compliment to CFD studies of external aerodynamics. This paper presents estimation error based performance comparison of five different supervised learning algorithms: Support Vector Regression, Polynomial Regression, Linear Regression and two different models of Neural Networks for prediction of aerodynamic drag coefficient corresponding to each vehicle in a two, three and four vehicle platoon configurations based on the drag coefficients provided by experimental study at different inter-vehicle distances. Predicted drag coefficients are then juxtaposed with CFD data from numerical simulations to evaluate closeness to experimental drag coefficients. Results reveal that polynomial regression model best fits the aerodynamics with 0.0223 estimation error. To the best of our knowledge no machine learning based methods have been applied before for modeling aerodynamic drag on vehicle platoon.