Taufiq Rahman

Ghazal Farhani, Taufiq Rahman, Kieran Humphries

Accurate EV power estimation underpins range prediction and energy management, yet practitioners need both point accuracy and trustworthy uncertainty. We propose an anchored-ensemble Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) with a Student-t likelihood that jointly captures epistemic (model) and aleatoric (data) uncertainty. Anchoring imposes a Gaussian weight prior (MAP training), yielding posterior-like diversity without test-time sampling, while the t-head provides heavy-tailed robustness and closed-form prediction intervals. Using vehicle-kinematic time series (e.g., speed, motor RPM), our model attains strong accuracy: RMSE 3.36 +/- 1.10, MAE 2.21 +/- 0.89, R-squared = 0.93 +/- 0.02, explained variance 0.93 +/- 0.02, and delivers well-calibrated uncertainty bands with near-nominal coverage. Against competitive baselines (Student-t MC dropout; quantile regression with/without anchoring), our method matches or improves log-scores while producing sharper intervals at the same coverage. Crucially for real-time deployment, inference is a single deterministic pass per ensemble member (or a weight-averaged collapse), eliminating Monte Carlo latency. The result is a compact, theoretically grounded estimator that couples accuracy, calibration, and systems efficiency, enabling reliable range estimation and decision-making for production EV energy management.

Syed Mostaquim Ali, Taufiq Rahman, Ghazal Farhani et al.

For developing safe Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS), rigorous testing is required before they are deemed safe for road deployments. Since comprehensive conventional physical testing is impractical due to cost and safety concerns, Virtual Testing Environments (VTE) can be adopted as an alternative. Comparing VTE-generated sensor outputs against their real-world analogues can be a strong indication that the VTE accurately represents reality. Correspondingly, this work explores a comprehensive experimental approach to finding evaluation metrics suitable for comparing real-world and simulated LiDAR scans. The metrics were tested in terms of sensitivity and accuracy with different noise, density, distortion, sensor orientation, and channel settings. From comparing the metrics, we found that Density Aware Chamfer Distance (DCD) works best across all cases. In the second step of the research, a Virtual Testing Environment was generated using real LiDAR scan data. The data was collected in a controlled environment with only static objects using an instrumented vehicle equipped with LiDAR, IMU and cameras. Simulated LiDAR scans were generated from the VTEs using the same pose as real LiDAR scans. The simulated and LiDAR scans were compared in terms of model perception and geometric similarity. Actual and simulated LiDAR scans have a similar semantic segmentation output with a mIoU of 21\% with corrected intensity and an average density aware chamfer distance (DCD) of 0.63. This indicates a slight difference in the geometric properties of simulated and real LiDAR scans and a significant difference between model outputs. During the comparison, density-aware chamfer distance was found to be the most correlated among the metrics with perception methods.

Ghazal Farhani, Taufiq Rahman, Syed Mostaquim Ali et al.

Because 3D structure of a roadway environment can be characterized directly by a Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensors, they can be used to obtain exceptional situational awareness for assitive and autonomous driving systems. Although LiDARs demonstrate good performance in clean and clear weather conditions, their performance significantly deteriorates in adverse weather conditions such as those involving atmospheric precipitation. This may render perception capabilities of autonomous systems that use LiDAR data in learning based models to perform object detection and ranging ineffective. While efforts have been made to enhance the accuracy of these models, the extent of signal degradation under various weather conditions remains largely not quantified. In this study, we focus on the performance of an automotive grade LiDAR in snowy conditions in order to develop a physics-based model that examines failure modes of a LiDAR sensor. Specifically, we investigated how the LiDAR signal attenuates with different snowfall rates and how snow particles near the source serve as small but efficient reflectors. Utilizing our model, we transform data from clear conditions to simulate snowy scenarios, enabling a comparison of our synthetic data with actual snowy conditions. Furthermore, we employ this synthetic data, representative of different snowfall rates, to explore the impact on a pre-trained object detection model, assessing its performance under varying levels of snowfall

Roksana Yahyaabadi, Ghazal Farhani, Taufiq Rahman et al.

Accurate power consumption prediction is crucial for improving efficiency and reducing environmental impact, yet traditional methods relying on specialized instruments or rigid physical models are impractical for large-scale, real-world deployment. This study introduces a scalable data-driven method using powertrain dynamic feature sets and both traditional machine learning and deep neural networks to estimate instantaneous and cumulative power consumption in internal combustion engine (ICE), electric vehicle (EV), and hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) platforms. ICE models achieved high instantaneous accuracy with mean absolute error and root mean squared error on the order of $10^{-3}$, and cumulative errors under 3%. Transformer and long short-term memory models performed best for EVs and HEVs, with cumulative errors below 4.1% and 2.1%, respectively. Results confirm the approach's effectiveness across vehicles and models. Uncertainty analysis revealed greater variability in EV and HEV datasets than ICE, due to complex power management, emphasizing the need for robust models for advanced powertrains.

Ghazal Farhani, Taufiq Rahman, Dominique Charlebois

Rainy weather significantly increases the risk of road accidents due to reduced visibility and vehicle traction. Understanding how experienced drivers adapt their visual perception through gaze behavior under such conditions is critical for designing robust driver monitoring systems (DMS) and for informing advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). This case study investigates the eye gaze behavior of a driver operating the same highway route under both clear and rainy conditions. To this end, gaze behavior was analyzed by a two-step clustering approach: first, clustering gaze points within 10-second intervals, and then aggregating cluster centroids into meta-clusters. This, along with Markov transition matrices and metrics such as fixation duration, gaze elevation, and azimuth distributions, reveals meaningful behavioral shifts. While the overall gaze behavior focused on the road with occasional mirror checks remains consistent, rainy conditions lead to more frequent dashboard glances, longer fixation durations, and higher gaze elevation, indicating increased cognitive focus. These findings offer valuable insight into visual attention patterns under adverse conditions and highlight the potential of leveraging gaze modeling to aid in the design of more robust ADAS and DMS.