ATLASCAR

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

State of the Art - Commercial Solutions

Every car on the roads have a odometer on the dashboard that shows the instantaneous velocity, although most of them have a odometer actuated mechanically so that there is no electrical signal that can be measured.
There are already some companies that sell devices capable of measuring wheel's speed and orientation. Most of this devices are used by automobile manufacturers to test the dynamics and durability of their products. 
The company Kistler Automotive sells various sensors that can be used to measure velocity and direction of a car, they provide one product that measures wheel's rotation and others that are optical and measure velocity and orientation without contact. The WPT Sensors is a sensor that is universally adaptable for acquisition of vehicle wheel speed (figure 1). This sensor consists of an optical incremental encoder and has 1000 pulses in its standard configuration. Its applications are wheel slip measurement, acceleration and braking tests, ABS testing. [1]

Figure 1 - WPT sensors from Kistler Automotive
Kistler has another kind of solution based on optical sensors, the 2-Axis Non Contact Optical Velocity and Slip Angle Sensors [1]. These sensors provide slip-free measurement of distance, velocity and slip-angle which is the angle between a rolling wheel's actual direction of travel and the direction towards which it is pointing (figure 2).

LFII-P SensorS350 racing
Aquaplaning Testing
Figure 2 - 2-Axis Non Contact Optical Velocity and Slip Angle Sensors

Applanix provides a solution based on GPS and inertial sensors, the POS LV (figure 3). POS LV is a position and orientation system, utilizing integrated inertial technology to generate stable, reliable and repeatable positioning solutions for land-based vehicle applications.The product generates a true representation of vehicle motion in all three axes, works in areas of intermittent, or no GPS reception, computes wheel rotation information to aid vehicle positioning, embedded GPS receivers provide heading aiding to supplement the inertial data. [2]

POS LV
Figure 3 - POS LV

[1] - http://www.kistler.com
[2] - http://www.applanix.com

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