In the blink of an eye
January 2009
PLCs, DCSs & Controllers
ÖAMTC, an Austrian automobile club, has been setting new technology standards in safety training for decades. Thanks to a state-of-the-art controller from B&R and innovation from Perfect Drive Solutions, the quality of training has been increased even further.
Two hours of driving, the windshield wipers have been running at full-speed for at least the last 100 km. The driver adapts his speed to the wet asphalt and attempts to concentrate on the traffic as best as possible. Suddenly the mobile phone rings and the driver answers on a hands-free kit, thankful for the welcome change. That is when it happens: as if out of nowhere, a deer suddenly stands in the middle of the road. In a moment of shock, the right foot instinctively reaches for the brake pedal, and...
Franz Wurz, Director of ÖAMTC driving safety, believes that in principle, anyone could find themselves in this sort of situation, but only a minority of drivers actually knows how to react properly. Wurz: “The simulation of these types of extreme conditions is one of the most important aspects of the initial and advanced training courses we offer. In the past, this was accomplished using a water jet system implanted in the road – essentially a fountain that is switched on abruptly. Water has the disadvantage that the driver does not sense true danger and therefore reacts in a different manner psychologically than he would with a real object. As a result of our positive experience with Perfect Drive Solutions we set them the task of developing a more suitable system.”
Simulating a situation where the driver is unexpectedly confronted with an obstacle such as the deer on the street has special requirements: the driver must be confronted with an object that appears suddenly without expecting it to occur.
When driving at a speed of 60 km/h on the track prepared by Perfect Drive Solutions, approximately 1 m tall bars pop-up suddenly from the asphalt. A driver gets a real shock the first time he experiences this – panicked braking is the typical reaction. The obstacle quickly drops back into the road if the vehicle cannot stop in time, thereby avoiding collision. Karl Fischereder of Perfect Drive Solutions says, “Our obstacle pops-up within 0,3 seconds and drops back into the road equally as fast using a pneumatic drive system.”
To realistically simulate unexpected appearance of the obstacle, the popup and retraction impulse must appear synchronised to the speed and position of the approaching vehicle. To do this, Perfect Drive Solutions uses classical inductions loops, which send a signal to the controller at the side of the test track when they detect the presence of a vehicle.
“The real task was to measure the speed of a vehicle moving up to 130 km/h with an accuracy of 3%, which placed a demand for 1-2 millisecond cycle times on the control CPU being used. We had difficulty finding a system on the market that could meet these performance requirements, and when we added the requirements for compact design, an integrated task class system and programmability in a high-level language such as C, most suppliers could only reply with a shrug of their shoulders,” explains Fischereder.
Perfect Drive solutions was however able to find a suitable product from B&R. The X20CP0291 and X20CP0292 CPUs met all of the requirements and also fitted the price expectations, allowing Perfect Drive Solutions to introduce the complete dry obstacle track to the market at an attractive price.
“My development work showed that even special tasks such as this with unconventional requirements can be solved with B&R’s state-of-the-art product range thanks to cost-effective products that can handle unconventional demands,” concludes Fischereder.
For more information contact Rob Snowball, Klare Technologies, +27 (0)41 503 9900, [email protected], www.klaretech.com
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