Sensing a Safer Future - Ford electronic parts - Brief Article

Automotive Manufacturing & Production,  Jan, 2001  by Gary S. Vasilash

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Ford is undertaking efforts to improve the safety of the vehicles it produces--not only for drivers and passengers, but even for pedestrians. Although much of the work described here is still in the development phases and will undoubtedly undergo change before it makes it to production vehicles, one thing is certain: the amount of electronics in a vehicle will undoubtedly increase...

An approach that Ford Motor Co. is taking in terms of vehicle development is "Cleaner, Safer, Sooner," by which it means that company engineers are working to roll out cars with the first two characteristics ASAP. As Helen Petrauskas, vice president, Environmental and Safety Engineering, Ford, puts it, the initiative is about "using the vast resources of Ford Motor Company around the globe, including supplier relationships, to develop breakthrough technologies and then to apply those technologies as soon as feasible across our brands and to high-volume vehicles like a Ford Taurus, a Mercury Mountaineer or a Ford Mondeo in Europe. It's also about developing fuel cell and hybrid vehicles.

"And it's about taking those actions for our customers, over and above what regulations demand."

So on the one hand they are looking to the future. But on the other hand, that future isn't so far away in some cases; it is almost at arm's length.

An evident fact in many of the conceptual developments that the automaker has developed is that as new cars are brought out, the quantity and importance of electronics will be such that they will almost become as fundamental to an automobile as a steering wheel and tires.

The following vehicles are test beds. Their technology could undoubtedly be transferred to other vehicle types. Or maybe their technology will be eclipsed by something else. Either way, change will undoubtedly occur.

Getting Help-Stat.

It's dark. A car goes off the road. Into a ditch. The driver is injured. But it is dark. And the other cars on the highway keep zooming by. How is that person to be found?

According to Srini Sundarajan, supervisor--Safety, Research & Development, Ford Motor, the answer to that question is, sometimes, iffy. It is possible that said driver may not be found...until it is too late.

That's just one scenario that the RescueCar is being developed to address with a happier ending. The facts that in the U.S. there are 40,000 lives lost in highway accidents and five million injuries per annum are also behind this development. The faster medical help can get to people, the better off those people will be. People who are treated by medical personnel immediately after an accident are better off not only in terms of healing, but with regard to living. When it comes to response, speed heals.

So the RescueCar, based on a Ford Taurus, is fitted with what is being called Ford's "Personal Safety System." This safety system is in many ways analogous to the crash sensors that are used in CART race cars: there are sensors that measure crash energy (g-forces) and direction (front, rear, side). There is also a small digital camera (CMOS camera) mounted by the rear-view mirror that takes a photo before (an image is taken every 15 seconds, overwriting the last one) and after an accident. This provides an indication of not only who is in the car, but what positions and conditions they are in after the event.

When an accident occurs, there is a signal sent to a Rescue Center. An onboard global positioning system provides vehicle location. The Rescue Center attendant, working with a standard PC, not only obtains sensor information (in addition to the data collected by the tri-axial accelerometer, information about seatbelts and airbag deployment are sent) but is in audio connection with the vehicle. Based on the information obtained, EMS personnel dispatched to the scene are better equipped to handle the situation (e.g., there are a sufficient number of people arriving to deal with the number of people who are involved in the accident).

Sundarajan says that one of the big issues related to the feasibility of the RescueCar is the infrastructure for the Rescue Center. Given the proliferation of sensors and microprocessors on vehicles, the technical aspect of the vehicle is undoubtedly not as vexing as simply creating the system to deal with the information that the Personal Safety System provides.

Can You Feel My Heart Beat?

What does the SecureCar have in common with earthquakes? Sam Ebenstein, staff technical specialist at Ford, answers that the relation between the two has to do with highly accurate sensors, geophone sensors. In the case of earthquakes, the sensors are used to detect the onset of temblors. In the case of the SecureCar, which is based, in this case, on a Volvo S80, the geophones are used to detect heartbeats. But the geophones have been miniaturized so that they are microaccelerometers.

This is one of the cases of technology transfer from a national lab, Oak Ridge National Lab. Apparently, the technology was developed so that security guards at nuclear power plants would attach two geophones to cars entering or leaving facilities. The geophones would be able to measure the sounds of the vehicle and to actually detect heartbeats (so if there was someone hiding in the car, they'd be discovered).