Acquiring requirements on drive comfort by quantifying the accelerations affecting vehicle occupants

Abstract:
With the ongoing development of automated vehicles, the occupant and his activities during driving are becoming increasingly relevant for research. Presently, the focus of attention is on how the occupant and thus the vehicle itself must drive, in order to offer optimal comfort. This article describes the setup of a body measurement system (BMS) for the high-precision detection of the occupant’s movement. The measurement technique makes it possible to detect accelerations acting on occupants during driving with inertial sensors measuring in a local coordinate system. The measured data can be transformed offline into a global reference frame. It also allows detecting and comparing multiple occupants in different vehicles and with different degrees of attention. By comparing the enhanced measurement technique with an optical motion capture system from Vicon, the effectiveness of the BMS can be shown.