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Described in this paper is a component test methodology to evaluate the door trim armrest performance in an Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) side impact test and to predict the SID-IIs abdomen injury metrics (rib deflection, deflection rate and V*C). The test methodology consisted of a sub-assembly of two SID-IIs abdomen ribs with spine box, mounted on a linear bearing and allowed to translate in the direction of impact. The spine box with the assembly of two abdominal ribs was rigidly attached to the sliding test fixture, and is stationary at the start of the test. The door trim armrest was mounted on the impactor, which was prescribed the door velocity profile obtained from full-vehicle test. The location and orientation of the armrest relative to the dummy abdomen ribs was maintained the same as in the full-vehicle test.

Vehicle safety systems may use occupant physiological information, e.g., occupant heights and weights to further enhance occupant safety. Determining occupant physiological information in a vehicle, however, is a challenging problem due to variations in pose, lighting conditions and background complexity. In this paper, a novel occupant height estimation approach is presented. Depth information from a depth camera, e.g., Microsoft Kinect is used. In this 3D approach, first, human body and frontal face views (restricted by the Pitch and Roll values in the pose estimation) based on RGB and depth information are detected. Next, the eye location (2D coordinates) is detected from frontal facial views by Haar-cascade detectors. The eye-location co-ordinates are then transferred into vehicle co-ordinates, and seated occupant eye height is estimated according to similar triangles and fields of view of Kinect.

Periprosthetic fractures refer to the fractures that occur in the vicinity of the implants of joint replacement arthroplasty. Most of the fractures during an automotive frontal collision involve the long bones of the lower limbs (femur and tibia). Since the prevalence of persons living with lower limb joint prostheses is increasing, periprosthetic fractures that occur during vehicular accidents are likely to become a considerable burden on health care systems. It is estimated that approximately 4.0 million adults in the U.S. currently live with Total Knee Replacement (TKR) implants. Therefore, it is essential to study the injury patterns that occur in the long bone of a lower limb containing a total knee prosthesis. The aim of the present study is to develop an advanced finite element model that simulates the possible fracture patterns that are likely during vehicular accidents involving occupants who have knee joint prostheses in situ.

Due to the variation of compartment design and occupant’s posture in self-driving cars, there is a new and major challenge for occupant protection. In particular, the studies on occupant restraint systems used in the self-driving car have been significantly delayed compared to the development of the autonomous technologies. In this paper, a numerical study was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of three typical restraint systems on the driver protection in three different scenarios.

In a frontal automotive crash, the driver's foot is usually stepping on the brake pedal as an instinctive response to avoid a collision. The tensile force generated in the Achilles tendon produces a compressive preload on the tibia. If there is intrusion of the toe board after the crash, an additional external force is applied to the driver's foot. A series of dynamic impact tests using human cadaveric specimens was conducted to investigate the combined effect of muscle preloading and external force. A constant tendon force was applied to the calcaneus while an external impact force was applied to the forefoot by a rigid pendulum. Preloading the tibia significantly increased the tibial axial force and the combination of these forces resulted in five tibial pylon fractures out of sixteen specimens.

Accident statistics have shown that older and obese occupants are less adaptable to existing vehicle occupant restraint systems than ordinary middle-aged male occupants, and tend to have higher injury risk in vehicle crashes. However, the current research on injury mechanism of aging and obese occupants in vehicle frontal impacts is scarce. This paper focuses on the optimization design method of occupant restraint system parameters for specific body type characteristics. Three parameters, namely the force limit value of the force limiter in the seat belt, pretensioner preload of the seat belt and the proportionality coefficient of mass flow rate of the inflator were used for optimization. The objective was to minimize the injury risk probability subjected to constraints of occupant injury indicator values for various body regions as specified in US-NCAP frontal impact tests requirements.

A collaborative robot or cobot is a robot that can safely and effectively interact with human workers while performing industrial tasks. The ability to work alongside humans has increased the importance of collaborative robots in the automation industry, as this unique feature is a much needed property among robots nowadays. Rethink Robotics has pioneered this unique discipline by building many robots including the Baxter Robot which is exclusive not only because it has collaborative properties, but because it has two arms working together, each with 7 Degrees Of Freedom. The main goal of this research is to validate the kinematic equations for the Baxter collaborative robot and develop a unified reconfigurable kinematic model for the Left and Right arms so that the calculations can be simplified.

The pia-arachnoid complex (PAC) covering the brain plays an important role in the mechanical response of the brain due to impact or inertial loading. The mechanical properties of the bovine PAC under tensile loading have been characterized previously. However, the transverse properties of this structure, such as shear and normal traction which are equally important to understanding the skull/brain interaction under traumatic loading, have not been investigated. These material properties are essential information needed to adequately define the material model of the PAC in a finite element (FE) model of human brain. The purpose of this study was to determine, experimentally, the material properties of the PAC under normal traction loading. PAC specimens were obtained from freshly slaughtered bovine subjects from various locations.

With the rapid development of intelligent driving technology, there has been a growing interest in the driving comfort of automated vehicles. As vehicles become more automated, the role of the driver shifts from actively engaging in driving tasks to that of a passenger. Consequently, the study of the passenger experience in automated driving vehicles has emerged as a significant research area. In order to examine the impact of automatic driving on passengers' riding experience in vehicle platooning scenarios, this study conducted real vehicle experiments involving six participants. The study assessed the subjective perception scores, eye movement, and electrocardiogram (ECG) signals of passengers seated in the front passenger seat under various vehicle speeds, distances, and driving modes. The results of the statistical analysis indicate that vehicle speed has the most substantial influence on passenger perception.

Researches on pedestrian protection have become a very important theme in automotive industry. Design for vehicle front-bumper system has proven rather essential and been extensively used to improve the vehicle performance of pedestrian protection. However, there are some limitations in the design of vehicle front-bumper system to meet a multiple-pedestrian impact conditions at the same time. In order to improve the vehicle performance of lower extremity and pelvis protection for pedestrian, a new type of front bumper airbag was developed. Firstly, based on European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro-NCAP), the Flexible Pedestrian Legform Impactor (Flex-PLI) to vehicle and Upper Pedestrian Legform Impactor (U-PLI) to vehicle impact tests are carried out to evaluate the pedestrian protection performance of the initial structure.

Human tolerance to knee, chest, and head impacts based upon skeletal fracture of cadavers is reported. The results are based upon unrestrained cadaver impacts in a normal seated position in simulated frontal force accidents at velocities between 10 and 20 mph and stopping distances of 6-8 in. The head target was covered with 15/16 in. of padding. No skull or facial fractures were observed at loads up to 2640 lb. Extensive facial fractures and a linear skull fracture occurred during the application of the maximum head force of 4350 lb. The chest target was 6 in. in diameter with 15/16 in.of padding. The padding was rolled over the edge of the target to minimize localized high force areas on the ribs. A 1/8 in. diameter rod was inserted through the chest and fastened through a ball joint and flange to the soft tissue at the sternum.

The main purpose of this study was to determine the impact responses of the different body regions (shoulder, thorax, abdomen and pelvis/leg) of the ES-2re and SID-IIs dummies using rigid wall impacts under different initial test conditions. The experimental set-up consisted of a flat rigid wall with five instrumented load-wall plates aligned with dummy’s shoulder, thorax, abdomen, pelvis and knee impacting a stationary dummy seated on a rigid seat at a pre-determined velocity. The relative location and orientation of the load-wall plates was adjusted relative to the body regions of the ES-2re and SID-IIs dummies respectively.

An understanding of stiffness characteristics of different body regions, such as thorax, abdomen and pelvis of ES-2re and SID-IIs dummies under controlled laboratory test conditions is essential for development of both compatible performance targets for countermeasures and occupant protection strategies to meet the recently updated FMVSS214, LINCAP and IIHS Dynamic Side Impact Test requirements. The primary purpose of this study is to determine the transfer functions between the ES-2re and SID-IIs dummies for different body regions under identical test conditions using flat rigid wall sled tests. The experimental set-up consists of a flat rigid wall with five instrumented load-wall plates aligned with dummy’s shoulder, thorax, abdomen, pelvis and femur/knee impacting a stationary dummy seated on a rigid low friction seat at a pre-determined velocity.

The main purpose of this study was to determine the impact responses of the different body regions (shoulder, thorax, abdomen and pelvis/leg) of the ES-2re and SID-IIs dummies using rigid wall impacts under different initial test conditions. The experimental set-up consisted of a flat rigid wall with five instrumented load-wall plates aligned with dummy’s shoulder, thorax, abdomen, pelvis and knee impacting a stationary dummy seated on a rigid seat at a pre-determined velocity. The relative location and orientation of the load-wall plates was adjusted relative to the body regions of the ES-2re and SID-IIs dummies respectively.

Previous study suggested that female, thin, obese, and older occupants had a higher risk of death and serious injury in motor vehicle crashes. Human body finite element models were a valuable tool in the study of injury biomechanics. The mesh deformation method based on radial basis function(RBF) was an attractive alternative for morphing baseline model to target models. Generally, when a complex model contained many elements and nodes, it was impossible to use all surface nodes as landmarks in RBF interpolation process, due to its prohibitive computational cost. To improve the efficiency, the current technique was to averagely select a set of nodes as landmarks from all surface nodes. In fact, the location and the number of selected landmarks had an important effect on the accuracy of mesh deformation. Hence, how to select important nodes as landmarks was a significant issue. In the paper, an efficient peak point-selection RBF mesh deformation method was used to select landmarks.

With the development of active safety technology, effort has gradually shifted to preventing or minimizing car crashes. Automatic Emergency Braking Technology (AEB) can avoid accidents by warning and even automatic braking, but there is a contradiction between the accompanying occupant out-of-position and traditional passive safety design. In addition, the 2025 version of C-NCAP plans to add neck injury assessment requirements for AEB [1]. In order to study the kinematic response of the occupant's neck under AEB, a neck finite element model with active muscle force is established in this paper. Firstly, the open-source THOR-50M neck geometric model is used for finite element discretization. Secondly, the neck FE model of THOR-50M is verified through the qualification procedure of the NHTSA standard. Thirdly, according to the geometric features of human neck muscles in Zygote Body database, the neck muscle parameters are preliminarily determined.

Several three-dimensional (3D) finite element (FE) models of the human body have been developed to elucidate injury mechanisms due to automotive crashes. However, these models are mainly focused on 50th percentile male. As a first step towards a better understanding of injury biomechanics in the small female, a 3D FE model of a 5th percentile female human chest (FEM-5F) has been developed and validated against experimental data obtained from two sets of frontal impact, one set of lateral impact, two sets of oblique impact and a series of ballistic impacts. Two previous FE models, a small female Total HUman Model for Safety (THUMS-AF05) occupant version 1.0ϐ (Kimpara et al., 2002) and the Wayne State University Human Thoracic Model (WSUHTM, Wang 1995 and Shah et al., 2001) were integrated and modified for this model development.

Up to now, there is no standard methodology that addresses how driver distraction is affected by perceptual demand and working memory demand - aside from visual allocation. In 2009, the Peripheral Detection Task (PDT) became a NHTSA recommended measure for driver distraction [1]. Then the PDT task was renamed as the Detection Response Task (DRT) because the International Standards Organization (ISO) has identified this task as a potential method for assessing selective attention in detection of visual, auditory, tactile and haptic events while driving. The DRT is also under consideration for adoption as an ISO standard surrogate test for driver performance for new telematics designs. The Wayne State University (WSU) driver imaging group [2, 3] improved the PDT and created the Enhanced Peripheral Detection Task I (EPDT-I) [4]. The EPDT-I is composed of a simple visual event detection task and a video of a real-world driving scene.

This paper describes the results of a project to develop a MADYMO occupant model for predicting thoracolumbar (TL) spine injuries during frontal impacts in the Indianapolis-type racing car (ITRC) environment and to study the effect of seat back angle, shoulder belt mounting location, leg hump, and spinal curvature on the thoracolumbar region. The newly developed MADYMO Race Car Driver Model (RCDM) is based on the Hybrid III, 50th percentile male model, but it has a multi-segmented spine adapted from the MADYMO Human Facet Model (HFM) that allows it to predict occupant kinematics and intervertebral loads and moments along the entire spinal column. Numerous simulations were run using the crash pulses from seven real-world impact scenarios and a 70 G standardized crash pulse. Results were analyzed and compared to the real-world impacts and CART HANS® model simulations.

Spinal kinematics and kinetics of human cadaveric specimens subjected to -Gx acceleration are reported along with an attempt to design a surrogate spine for use in an anthropomorphic test device (ATD). There were a total of 30 runs on 9 embalmed and 2 unembalmed cadavers which were heavily instrumented. External photographic targets were attached to T1, T12, and the pelvis to record spinal kinematics. The subjects were restrained by upper and lower leg clamps attached to an impact seat equipped with a six-axis load cell. A rigid link 486 mm long and pinned at both ends was proposed for use in an ATD as a surrogate spine. An optimization method was used to obtain the location and length of a linkage which followed the least squares path of Tl relative to the pelvis.