Toyota

About: Toyota is a company organization based out in Safenwil, Switzerland. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Internal combustion engine & Battery (electricity). The organization has 40032 authors who have published 55003 publications receiving 735317 citations. The organization is also known as: Toyota Motor Corporation & Toyota Jidosha KK.

Autonomous driving in a multi-level parking structure

Abstract: Recently, the problem of autonomous navigation of automobiles has gained substantial interest in the robotics community. Especially during the two recent DARPA grand challenges, autonomous cars have been shown to robustly navigate over extended periods of time through complex desert courses or through dynamic urban traffic environments. In these tasks, the robots typically relied on GPS traces to follow pre-defined trajectories so that only local planners were required. In this paper, we present an approach for autonomous navigation of cars in indoor structures such as parking garages. Our approach utilizes multi-level surface maps of the corresponding environments to calculate the path of the vehicle and to localize it based on laser data in the absence of sufficiently accurate GPS information. It furthermore utilizes a local path planner for controlling the vehicle. In a practical experiment carried out with an autonomous car in a real parking garage we demonstrate that our approach allows the car to autonomously park itself in a large-scale multi-level structure.

Benchmarking high surface area electrocatalysts in a gas diffusion electrode: measurement of oxygen reduction activities under realistic conditions

Abstract: In this work, we introduce the application of gas diffusion electrodes (GDE) for benchmarking the electrocatalytic performance of high surface area fuel cell catalysts. It is demonstrated that GDEs offer several inherent advantages over the state-of-the-art technique, i.e. thin film rotating disk electrode (TF-RDE) measurements for fast fuel cell catalyst evaluation. The most critical advantage is reactant mass transport. While in RDE measurements the reactant mass transport is severely limited by the gas solubility of the reactant in the electrolyte, GDEs enable reactant transport rates similar to technical fuel cell devices. Hence, in contrast to TF-RDE measurements, performance data obtained from GDE measurements can be directly compared to membrane electrode assembly (MEA) tests. Therefore, the application of GDEs for the testing of fuel cell catalysts closes the gap between catalyst research in academia and real applications.

Controller of drive device for vehicle

Abstract: A control apparatus for a vehicular drive system including a differential mechanism operable to distribute an output of an engine to a first electric motor and a power transmitting member, and a second electric motor connected to the power transmitting member. The control apparatus, which permits size reduction of the vehicular drive system, or improvements of fuel economy and vehicle drivability, includes a switching clutch or switching brake for switching a the differential mechanism between a continuously-variable shifting state and a step-variable shifting state, to enable the drive system to have both of an advantage of a fuel economy improvement of a transmission the speed ratio of which is electrically variable, and an advantage of high power transmitting efficiency of a gear type power transmitting device. The control apparatus includes an engine-torque-variation restriction control operable in the continuously-variable shifting state of the differential mechanism, to control an electric path torque, for restricting a variation of the torque to be transmitted to the power transmitting member, irrespective of a variation of the engine torque, so that the engine torque variation to be transmitted to drive wheels is restricted to improve the vehicle drivability.