Automotive Collision Mitigation Through Vehicle Dynamic Control

The ever important development of automotive crash mitigation systems has, over recent years, lead to the development of Advance Driver Assistance (ADA) systems. These systems use a variety of approaches to help avoid vehicle collision from occurring. However, these systems are still far from being able to prevent all collisions from occurring in the current environment. 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 ADA 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 initial development of a multibody vehicle dynamic crash analysis model. This enables the analysis of a generic vehicle dynamic model, together with a simple crash model, so that the effects of a variety of simple dynamic control approaches can be analysed. This will give a valuable insight into the effects of vehicle dynamic control on the collision severity. Initial results show that this simple and fast method of simulating both the vehicle dynamics and crash dynamics in a simple multibody model can be an effective and accurate tool for generic vehicle analysis. Results also show that even simple vehicle dynamic controls during the pre-impact, impact and post-impact stages of the collision can have a significant effect on the impact severity.