The Use of Vehicle Dynamic Control Systems for Automotive Collision Mitigation

The ever important development of automotive crash mitigation systems has, over recent years, lead to the development of Advance Driver Assistance systems (ADAS). These systems use a variety of approaches to help avoid vehicle collision from occurring in the first place. However, these systems are still far from being able to prevent all collision from occurring. This work aims to use vehicle dynamic control systems to optimize the vehicle´s dynamic characteristics for an impending collision. This will utilize the detection systems developed for these ADAS systems, to detect when an imminent collision has become unavoidable. To perform such studies, it is important to have a vehicle dynamic simulation that can also include the vehicle crash structural dynamics. These factors are key to analysing the point-of-impact and post-impact vehicle dynamics and the effects on the outcome of the impact. This paper outlines the strategy for a control systems approach to pre-setting the host vehicles dynamics and optimise the vehicle for the detected collision scenario. The initial development of a multibody vehicle dynamic crash analysis model is also discussed. This model will enable the analysis of a generic vehicle dynamic model, together with a simple crash model in order to study the effects of the implemented control strategy. Initial results show that this simple and fast method of simulating both the vehicle dynamics and crash dynamics in a multibody model can be an effective and accurate tool for generic vehicle analysis.