Electronic application to evaluate the driver’s activity on the polluting emissions of road traffic

Abstract

The polluting emissions (gases and particles) produced by the traffic of automobiles are directly related to the activity of vehicle, but they are also affected by the route conditions and moreover, by the driver's behavior. However, PAMS commercial systems do not usually include elements to register this last component. This article presents an electronic system, specially designed to evaluate, ad-hoc, the effect of driver's activity on polluting emissions. This electronic application integrates a hardware and a software component, both designed concerning MIVECO research project. From the hardware component the sensorial part stands out, formed by potentiometers connected to the pedals that control the vehicle and the inertial device, which allows one to evaluate the instantaneous accelerations in the x-y-z-axes as well as the turns with respect to these axes. Once the signals are conditioned and acquired, the software component processes them for on-line monitoring in a GUI and stores them in a database to facilitate its evaluation off-line. This electronic application has two important properties: it can be incorporated in any vehicle of the market (light or heavy, diesel or gasoline, pre or post-eobd) and it allows the capture and registration of information about the driver's activity synchronously with PEMS (gases and/or particles) systems. The work includes experimental results obtained in an urban circuit in the city of Madrid.

Alternative Sensor System and MLP Neural Network for Vehicle Pedal Activity Estimation

“…This section describes the methodology followed to obtain the PA and MV signals. As result of previous research authors’ work [ 9 ]; an in-vehicle electronic system has been designed to measure the driver activity and its effects on driving dynamics. The designed system consists of three basic subsystems as shown in Figure 3 .…”

“…The instantaneous and simultaneous measurement of the three car pedals is a difficult task in the great majority of vehicles. In fact, there are 3 methods to directly measure the status of the car pedals: using position sensors [ 9 ], using pressure sensors [ 10 – 14 ] and through the electronics system provided by the vehicle manufacturer (e.g., SMART and RAVEL-I [ 2 , 15 ]).…”

“…The authors of this paper have the design experience of a universal and non-disturbing solution (Miveco Resesarch Project [ 9 ]) to register the displacement of the pedals by means of potentiometers as shown in Figure 1 . However, four basic problems have been related to these pedal sensors.…”