F2008-08-117
Car Interior Sensing Environment for Adaptive Individual Safety
Europe enjoys constantly decreasing numbers of traffic fatalities per year. While in the EU25 there were 50396 fatalities in 2001, the number was reduced to about 41400 by 2005. In North America however, the number of fatalities remains on a constant level (2001: 42196; 2005: 43443). Unfortunately, the emerging countries even experience a strong increase in traffic fatalities numbers year by year.
One can ask if further developments of passive safety systems are still needed or if it is smarter to invest in crash avoidance systems. There is no single answer to this question but it is clear that a continuous improvement of passive safety systems has a high potential for decreasing the number of traffic fatalities worldwide.
The goal of passive safety systems is to reduce the injury risk in case of a crash, and a restraint system individually tailored to the occupant could offer optimised protection. Current restraint systems are mainly optimised for the 50%-male, not offering optimal protection for smaller or larger occupants. "Individually tailored" has to be translated as detecting and monitoring the type, size, age, position and health condition of the occupants and to adapt the restraint systems accordingly. Sensing technologies to provide all the necessary data in real time are available or in a close to mass production maturity status. But due to the quite late crash detection, there is little time to tailor the restraint systems based on above mentioned occupant data. To individualize existing passive safety systems by adding enhanced occupant sensing environment will be very cost intensive for a little benefit.
The industry has to re-design the concept of passive safety in cars. Individualizing the passive safety opens the possibility to sell to the end customer a "safety sensation" and motivate him to invest in passive safety.
Some car manufactures (e.g. Daimler) have introduced a first approach to optimise the passive safety with input from sensor fusion systems (presafe). A smart fusion in hard- and software will lead to an economic and robust next generation passive safety system. An important first step would be to use pre-crash sensing devices (radar, laser scanner, 3D vision systems,...) to pre-set the passive safety system. In a next step a T0 sensing device in the front end should verify the pre-set and activate the restraint systems. As the timeframe in which the restraint systems are activated can be increased, a new generation of reversible and non-pyrotechnical systems can be taken into consideration. Sensing systems inside of the car like a 3D Camera will deliver the most relevant occupant information.
Equipping all seating positions of vehicles with seat belt reminder systems would reduce worldwide the number of traffic fatalities by about 30%, simply by increasing the buckle up discipline. In the US, one quarter of fatally injured vehicle occupants are ejected out of the vehicle. Further improvements to lower the traffic fatalities can only be realized by next generation adaptive reversible low cost passive restraint systems and active crash avoidance systems.
Session: Occupant & Pedestrian Protection II