Evaluation of the Acceptance of Safety Belts in Coaches

The Forschungsverbund Verkehrstechnik und Verkehrssicherheit (FVV) – Research Network for Traffic Safety - currently performs a study – an interdisciplinary cooperation between the FH-Trier and the University of Trier – to evaluate the acceptance of safety belts.
Task
For this purpose all seats and belts of a coach were equipped with digital sensors. A data logging system is supposed to collect data of the occupancy of the seat and the use of the safety belt. The collecting of the data is performed fully automated and without being recognized by the passenger. Besides the digital data – e.g. actual GPS position of the bus - has to be acquired. Furthermore the area of operation of the bus is all over Europe and the collected information is supposed to be monitored at any time, which requires the ability of a remote request.
The hardware should match the following requirements: | |
Hardware | Data Access |
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Solution
The task was solved by the use of a mobile system based on the CompactRIOTM platform by National Instruments. CompactRIO systems are robust, compact and furthermore very powerful due to the FPGA technology.
Four digital modules (cRIO 9425) each measuring 32 channels are used to collect the signals of the seats. The system controls the data logging as well as it acquires the actual GPS position of the vehicle.
The required mobility is achieved by the use of the cRIO Gxxx Mobile module from S.E.A. Datentechnik GmbH. This module is simultaneously responsible for the position determination and the data transfer via mobile radio telephone service. It conjoins an accurate and fast GPS receiver with a GSM modem for the connection to the Internet (via public mobile radio telephone service).
In this presented application the cRIO Gxxx Mobile module transmits collected data via GSM/GPRS all over Europe using different mobile radio telephone services and Internet to a central server. Data transfer is initialized by SMS likewise status information (e.g. the position of the vehicle) can be queried by SMS, too.
The software was created based on LabVIEWTM by National Instruments with LabVIEW RealTime and LabVIEW FPGA. For the visualization of the position data (position tracking) a common navigation software is used.