Development Of An Automotive Pre-Crash Safety Platform

Automotive Pre-Crash Safety technology is a new automotive safety research field which integrating both Active Safety and Passive Safety. It uses radar to detect the environment, and then based on this information, it makes an estimation on the occurrance possibility of collision, the time to the possible collision and the strength of it. Hence, the traditional occupant restraint devices can be improved.The object of this research is to develop a platform to make research on pre-crash safety technology. For one thing, it can be used to prove the feasibility of pre-crash safety; for another, it can be used in the further technology development.For the hardware, this platform are composed of a test vehicle, a minimeter wave radar, a CAN Bus network, an industrial personal computer and occupant constraint equipments, which including a reversible pretentional seatbelt, a normal electrical seat, and a normal skylight. The millimeter radar used comes from Delph ESR series, which has the ability to detect the motion parameters on the obstacles. The occupant constraint equipments comes from Hsin Chong Group company. These devices are controlled by Freescale S12 series single chip microcomputers. The communication between all these devices, including the receiving of the sensor and the sending of the control signals, is operated in a CAN bus. The core node of this CAN bus is a CAN control software, which is developed and ran in a industrial personal computer .For the software, this research developed a preliminary method to carry out the occupant constraint equipments’action strategy by using MADYMO for Finite Element Simulation. And then based on these hardware components, the research developed a CAN control software to control different devices for the pre-crash application, as well as to integrate the pre-crash algorithms, which includes the information selection algorithm, the pre-crash judgement algorithm and the occupant restraint device’s action algorithm. It also designed a series of Pre-Crash oriented CAN bus protocols.In the end, the research carried out several experiments which integrated all the staffs mentioned above. The experiments’results showed that this platform was available to be used to make further research.