Design and Experimental Validation of a Sensor-Based Safety-Enhanced Braking System for Low-Cost Automotive Applications

Abstract

In recent times, automobile depends upon the active and passive safety systems to enhance the safety features due to increased rate of accidents. The causes of the accidents are increasing nowadays and therefore the fatality rate also increases. The automotive safety system had developed widely in costlier vehicles but unfortunately not in low end vehicles. The statistics describe that the safety systems in the low-cost vehicles are as par with high-cost vehicles and hence the fatality rate is also more than the high-cost vehicles. The causes of accidents were investigated by many researchers and they highlighted that the several road accidents were caused by inattention of drivers and in specific 77% fatality were mainly due to drivers’ fault during regular driving. In this work, research was carried out to reduce the fatality rate and damages in emergency condition. The proposed research is to make the vehicle to come to stopping position by activating the braking system at the time of emergency. Ultrasonic sensor senses the obstacles and object present ahead of the vehicle. A new hydraulic actuator is developed and is connected with the brake pedal and actuator, it is actuated when signal from the control unit, press the brake pedal to slow down the vehicle in critical situations. The experimental setup is used for the testing the proposed system and to evaluate the performance of control algorithm with sensor-based technology. The safety enhances braking system is implemented for the proposed system by adding the actuator on the brake pedal without any change in the existing brake system. The concept of this research is to reduce the severity of injury, fatality in emergency condition.