The current passive safety situation
One of the significant issues in the automotive safety systems is the inherent bias concerning body physiques. Passive safety systems are generally tested with few cases, the most common being the ‘average male’: 175cm, 78kg. Safe to say, many passengers do not fit these specific cases, especially children, women and elderly occupants.
Moreover, new developments in the automotive industry such as ADAS and automated vehicles need to be considered. These can have an impact on the passengers affecting the efficiency of passive safety systems. For instance, when the AEB is activated, it can dramatically change the body positioning of the passengers and in cases when the airbag deployment is not adapted accordingly, it can potentially lead to injuries or even fatalities.
The smart-RCS project
Aiming to eliminate bias and create the optimal safety environment for all passengers, Veoneer, emotion3D, and AVL have come together on the smart-RCS project in order to create the world’s first personalised restraint control system.
Each company has contributed their expertise to successfully develop such a system. Emotion3D’s human analysis software called CabinEye in combination with a 3D imaging camera developed by Veoneer is used to detect the body characteristics and body positioning during driving and right before impact. The resulting system was integrated in Veoneer’s existing adaptive restraint control system to obtain the crash and occupant information and for calculating an optimal airbag deployment strategy. The whole system was integrated in a vehicle environment to be able to also demonstrate it to potential customers. The outcoming product was tested by AVL, one of the world’s leading companies for development, simulation and testing in the automotive industry.
Since the beginning of the project, we interacted with several OEMs and included key people such as industry professionals, academics, and regulatory stakeholders in a project advisory board to ensure constructive feedback and rapid application of the technology.
Outcomes and outlook
In 2022 at the AutoSens event in Brussels, the smart-RCS project was awarded with one of the most prestigious awards in our industry, namely the “Most Innovative In-Cabin Perception Application” award.
From the development phases onwards, there has been strong interest from OEMs and the project partners already successfully demonstrated the outcoming solution on-site to OEMs. All partners are currently actively working on the commercialization of the product. Findings of the project will be shared with regulatory stakeholders such as Euro NCAP who have included driver and occupant monitoring systems as well as ‘smarter restraint deployment’ in their Vision 2030 publication. The smart-RCS project shares this vision and aims to support the development of new standards in the industry in the near future.
For more details about the project please visit the website: https://smart-rcs.eu/