Development of an Automobile Black Box for Reconstruction Analysis of Collision Accidents

This paper presents design concepts, specifications and performances of a newly developed Black Box, the reconstruction analysis tool with the records, and results of validation tests. The Black Box can detect crash accidents automatically, and record the vehicle's motion and driver's maneuvers during a pre-defined time period before and after the accident. The items of the Black Box included the acceleration, yaw-rate, vehicle speed, engine RPM, braking application, steering and several digital inputs for recording driver's maneuvers. To detect the accident-related-crash, it is important to understand characteristics of the crash signal, which are much different from those of normal driving. Therefore, analytical considerations should be taken in designing pre-filtering circuits and selecting appropriate parameters for identifying crash accidents. And, it is necessary to select proper combination of motion sensors and design proper pre-filtering circuits in order to describe the vehicle's motion. The analysis algorithms were developed and implemented which can perform accurate detection of crash accidents, simulating pre-crash trajectories, and calculating parameters for reconstruction analysis of crash accidents. The developed Black Box was installed on passenger cars and several types of validation tests were conducted. Through the tests, the accuracy of the recorded data and usefulness of the analysis tool for reconstruction have been validated.

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