MOUNTING HOTPOT MEMBRANE POTENTIOMETER TO STEERING WHEEL
RECEIVER MODULE
MOUNTING MOTOR VIBRATOR TO SEAT DRIVER
RESULTS
CONCLUSION
Abstract
The main purpose of this project is to produce a safety system especially for fatigue and sleepy car driver so as to prevent from accidents.
These systems encompassed the approach of hand pressure applied on the steering wheel. The steering will be installed with pressure sensors. At the same time these sensors can be used to measure gripping force while driving by pressing the calibration button placed on the steering. When the driver gets fatigue or sleepy during driving the seat will vibrate and both thigh of driver will feel the vibration and also the buzzer will activate synchronously.
Wireless communication used to avoid the system looking fibred between steering wheel and motor vibrator inside the seat driver.
Keywords Fatigue, sleepy, hand pressure, calibration, Seat vibrationI INTRODUCTION Today modern living, transportation plays an important role in development of the country. However, the negative effect on a nation is the loss of life whereby the human factor life is considered priceless. There are numerous gadget and safety systems installed on cars or vehicles. To name a few, Automatic Break Syste (ABS), Air Bag, Finger Print technology to activate car, Distance sensors and many more. All these are to prevent fatality during accidents or to prevent accidents from happening. The government for instance has launched so many road safety campaigns to road users and even the police had ongoing speed limit exercises for speedster in order to discourage driver from speeding.
However, the result has not been encouraging. The system that I am proposing could in a way help reduces the increasing statistics of road accidents especially the fatigue car drivers which had also contributed in the road fatality statistic to increase.
Driver drowsiness is one of the major causes of serious traffic accidents. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) there are about 56,000 crashes caused by drowsy drivers every year in US, which results in about 1,550 fatalities and 40,000 nonfatal injuries annually. The actual tolls may be considerably higher than these statistics, since larger numbers of driver inattention accidents caused by drowsinessare not included in above numbers
The National Sleep Foundation also reported that 60% of adult drivers have driven while felling drowsy in past year, and 37% have ever actually fallen asleep at the wheel For this reason, a technique that can real-time detect the drivers drowsiness is of utmost importance to prevent drowsiness-caused accidents. If drowsiness status can be accurately detected, incidents can be prevented by countermeasures, such as the arousing of driver and deactivation of cruise control. Sleep cycle is divided into no rapid-eye-movement (NREM) sleep and rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep and the NREM sleep are further divided into stages 1-4. Drowsiness is stage 1 of NREM sleep the first stage of sleep .A number of efforts have been reported in the literature on the developing of drowsiness detection systems for drivers. Although it is a simple system but I believe in could help the fatigue drivers to deter them from road accidents.
STATISCTIC OF EVIDENCE
TABLE I STATISTIC REPORTED BY MALAYSIAN INSTITUTE OF ROAD SAFETY RESEARCH (MIROS)
Traffic accidents in Malaysia have been increasing at the average fatality index rate of 5.65 per 10,000 vehicles over the last a decade (see Table I).
Compared to the earlier years, total number of road accidents had increased from 215,632 cases in 1997 to 363,314 cases in 2007, reaching more than 68.48% increase of accident cases over 10 years
OBJECTIVES
The objectives are listed as follows:-
To display the attentiveness of driver while driving on the LCD.
To design the steering wheel complete with hand pressure sensor and communicate the main system to the vibration system via wireless communications and as a result the system will notify the sleepy drivers by using vibration and sound warning approaches.
To design automatic activation for the system by using combination speed of car and the system will automatic ON mode if the fuel pedal detect the angle of movement.
METHODOLOGY
The overall system contains two main parts there are transmission module and receiver module. The detail for this system work will be elaborated at the flow chart section.A. Transmission module
Fig. Block diagram for complete transmission The red arrows indicate the input data come from the sensors to the microcontroller PIC18F452. The sensor that was use in this project are two piece of Hot Potmembranepotentiometer, one potentiometer that will attached to the mechanical part where the angle of the fuel pedal movement can be measure and calibration button that mounting to the steering for calibration purpose.
Fig. shows the complete design for the transmission module. The blue arrows indicate the output data that will sent to buzzer, LED and also to Radio Frequency (RF) module transmission to activate the motor vibrator inside the seat using wireless communication Mounting HotPOt membrane potentiometer to steering wheel
the sensor strips are 24 inches long and 0.6 inches wide. The active area is 0.25 inches wide. They are polymer thick film (PTF) devices that exhibit a decrease in resistance when pressure is applied on their surface. These thick film devices are printed on the flexible substrate that can be cut, folded, twisted and bent without any damage. They come with a self adhesive stripe on the back, which allows easy application to a wide range of surfaces.
In our case, we attached two of these sensors on the perimeter of a steering wheel Sensor location on the steering wheel
The sensors were symmetrically placed on the circumference of the wheel, each covering half of it. The amplifier circuit, consisting of a voltage divider, operational amplifier and some additional power stabilizing elements. The schematic of the amplifier board is given in fig. 5.
Fig. 5 Voltage divider and amplifier circuit
Previously it was mentioned that these sensor exhibit a decrease in resistance when pressure is applied on their surface. According to the fig. 5 the resistor, RM used as the voltage divider and as the result, the voltage drops on this resistor increase when more of forces act on these sensors. The different value of resistor, RM was used to determine the better performance of the sensor response and the results was plotted as shows in fig. 6.
Fig. 6 The graph Vout versus hand force
The measurement has been done by measuring the voltage drop from the output amplifier with the variations of hand forces on the steering wheel. As shown in fig. 6 the performance for red line is the better compare to the others.
The values of resistor, RM which are 7.5kK, 4.7kK and 1.5Kk were used to determine the response. As the result, the 4.7kK was selected to be installing for this project circuit because of the performances because the graph approach to be linear and make it easy to do the analysis. The normal range of hand force on the steering is between 250g and 350g by referring to the fig 6.
The software MPLAB 8.1v and C language was used to do the programming for the microcontroller PIC18F452
Receiver module
Fig.8 Receiver module circuit
For the receiver system it contains four important blocks a show n in fig 7. The four important blocks are Radio frequency (RF) receiver module, chip PT2272, Relay and also vibration system. RF receiver module will receive the data from transmitter module located at main system then the data will pass through the decoder chip PT2272. Next, the decoder chip PT2272 was connected to the relay and there is transistor joint between them. This transistor act as internal switch to activated the coil inside the relay when the transistor sense 5V at the base terminal.
Fig 8 shows thecomplete receiver module circuit. Motor vibrator that was connected to the relay only vibrate when the driver getting sleepy or fatigue during on wheel. For receiver module, it requires at least 12V DC and 1.5A because the load of motor vibrator drains much power when vibrated. There is power resistor installed in this circuit that act as protection for the circuit system when the current supply over the limit. This protection circuit prevented the circuit cause damage when the current over the limits.
Mounting motor vibrator to the seat Driver
There is two motor vibrator mounted to the seat driver and 12V DC power supply needed for the activation. The two red circles at the fig 7 indicate that two motor vibrator is mounted.
The motor vibrator need to place in the right location that is parallel to the thigh of driver when they seated. The both thigh of the driver will feel the vibration when they getting sleepy.
2010 6th International Colloquium on Signal Processing & Its Applications (CSPA). Two wire from the seat was connected to the circuit and the voltage to the motor should not be less than 12V 1.5A. The motor vibrator will slowly vibrate if the power supply is lessthan requirements value.
Fig. 8 Installation motor vibrator inside the seat.
This is very important because, when the driver gets sleepy or fatigue while driving the driver cannot feel the vibration due to the low of power and immediately the driver not be notify. If this situation occurred, it wills highly risk the driver for involving in an accident during fatigue or sleepy and also makes this system function less. instruction that ask the driver to do the calibration. At this moment, drivers need to press calibration button just a second
FLOW CHART OF THE SYSTEM
Fig. 9 Flow chart for the system.
The overall system will automatically activate when the driver start the car engine. The LCD will display the and immediately they need to grip the steering wheel with both their hands in normal gripped. At this stage the system will do the calibration by taking the average value that read from the sensor in 4 seconds time interval. Then the system will automatically set the range based on the average value calibrated. This calibration step should be done by the driver because each of them gets different hand forces act on the steering wheel. When the calibration is done the LCD will display calibration complete and buzzer will beep one time. The LCD will display calibration failed and the buzzer continuously beep when the driver not properly doing the calibration.
So, the drivers need to press reset button that is near of the calibration button to reset/restart the system and do again the calibration. After the calibration has been fulfilled, the driver can begin their journey. When the driver start to press the fuel pedal, the potentiometer will do the task to detect the angle of pedal and then the system will ready to notify the driver when they getting sleepy or fatigue based on the hand grip.
When the driver looses or tighten grip on the steering wheel (out of the calibration value) due to sleepiness or fatigue the resistance will be decrease or increase respectively, therefore triggering the seat vibration and sound warning. For the most cases, driver will loose the hand grip while fatigue or Sleepiness.This will allow the LCD panel displaying vibration is switch ON and the bright LED will turn on. The LED used to interrupt the driver vision by dazzle their eyes. The overall systems only function when the car is moving and the potentiometer detect resistance exceed 20% from the full scale value, 20kK. This is importantespecially when the car is stagnant due to warming up of engine or stops at traffic lights, and we dont want the seat vibration and also sound warning activate during both situations.
RESULTS
Fig. 10 The display of LCD panel when the car gets started
After the car engine get started the system will synchronously activated and the LCD will display as shown in fig 10. At this time, all the value of fuel pedal, right hand grip and left hand grip will display zero means no movement of car and hand force act on the steering. Therefore, the systems not trigger the vibration and sound system . The analysis has been made for the hand forces that act on the steering wheel. The detail analysis was explained in fig 6. Fig 11 shows the value that display by the LCD when the left hand of driver grips the steering wheel either softly or hardly.
The PIC18F452 microcontroller will convert analogue value from the amplifier to digital value for analysis purpose. Then the value of hand forces will display on the LCD panel.
To make this system achieve the objectives, some of the cases should be test to the system. We dont want the system continuously vibrate and triggering the sound system when the car is stagnant but the engine is still running out. The results that we expect is the system only triggering the seat vibration and sound system while the car get moving and the driver loose or tighten their grip on to the steering wheel.
As shown in fig , the vibration system and soundsystem are triggered while the car is moving and the driver looses their hand grip. According to the table II shows that there are four cases should be test to the system. As the results, the cases 1, 2 and 3 shows the status of seat vibration, LED and sound system are not triggered. The only case 4 triggering all the warning system when the car get moving and the hand grip is out of the range.
CONCLUSION
The above mentioned system was successfully done and tested by going through the approaches and methodology set in achieving the project objectives.
Overall the system had a value added in bringing the safety features especially to sleepy head and fatigue drivers. The system will ensure that all car drivers to give their full attentiveness while driving on the road and not to take safety for granted as it will not only caused their lives but others too.
Perhaps the percentage of road fatalities will fall tremendously and thus making our roads a safe passage to all our destinations when this system available in the market.
The system may be a reminder to all drivers that they should be in the best of alertness when they are behind the wheels or otherwise the system will automatically remind them.