Safe-by-wire: The leading edge in vehicle airbag control

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Safe-by-wire: The leading edge in vehicle airbag control

Boys, R.

Airbags have been deployed in over 2 million crashes saving thousands of lives and unfortunately, taking a few. Much knowledge has been gained in the last ten years from these crashes. This knowledge is being used to develop restraint systems with additional airbags and features to save more lives and reduce the severity of injuries and deaths caused by the system. Current airbag Systems consist of a crash sensor, two airbags and some sort of system to create an explosion to inflate this airbag quickly. Consumer and safety requirements are increasing the number of airbags per vehicle that need to be controlled in an intelligent manner. Smart air bag controllers can determine which bags are fired and at what times and which sequences in order to increase occupant survivability and reduce the cost of airbag replacement for repairable vehicles. Some vehicles already have an excess of 10 air bag systems and clearly a need for computer control to implement advanced features exists. The critical need to maintain the current high reliability factors in terms of misfiring and unintentional deployment must be maintained and perfected while adding more features. The Safe-by-Wire consortium has been formed to address these concerns and they have designed a new bus protocol. This article will examine some of the issues regarding air bag systems and the Safe-by-Wire protocol specifically.