A NEW DECISION-MAKING ALGORITHM FOR AIRBAG CONTROL

Recently, airbag systems have been introduced to supplement the seat b elt system primarily to reduce head injuries. Most of the present airb ag systems use distributed mechanical sensors, which are costly, not e asy to calibrate, and not effective to trigger the airbag on time for different types of crashes. An electronic sensor is more effective in the sense that the signal from the accelerometer can be digitized and analyzed to study the behavior of the signal for different types of cr ashes, Unfortunately, most of the algorithms which are used for electr onic sensors still have some problems. They either fail to trigger the airbag on time for several types of high speed crashes such as pole a nd angle crashes, or if they do trigger at these crashes they also tri gger at low speed barrier crashes. A new algorithm for an electronic s ensor is presented in this paper. This algorithm has been developed by analyzing a large volume of data obtained from actual crash testing e xperiments, The algorithm works for all types of crashes. The algorith m has been tested by applying it on real crash testing data, A hardwar e circuit has also been proposed in the paper, which can be used to im plement the algorithm for real-time operations.