VEHIOT: Evaluation of Smartphones as Data Acquisition Systems to Reduce Risk Situations in Commercial Vehicles

Vehicle dynamics studies are an indispensable characteristic to improve the vehicle stability and handling. To fulfil this requirement, control systems are included in commercial vehicles nowadays. These control systems consider variables such as lateral acceleration, roll rate and sideslip angle, that can be directly obtained from sensors or estimated from the collected data. With the objective of incorporating control systems without increasing the price of these vehicles, it is necessary to develop low-cost embedded systems, capable of acquiring data from a diversity of sensors to execute estimations and to perform control actions under real-time constraints. The increase of capabilities and features provided by smartphones enable them as data acquisition and processing devices. In this paper, an analysis in terms of reliability, accuracy and acquisition have been performed for two different smartphones in order to study the possibility to use this kind of devices as a low-cost sensing platform for vehicle dynamic applications. Each smartphone used in this study is classified into a different category (low-end or high-end device) depending on not only its price but also its specifications. Both yaw rate and lateral acceleration have been analyzed in order to quantify the performance of each smartphone. These variables have a direct influence on the vehicle lateral dynamics. Experimental tests have been carried out in a real scenario and the VBOX IMU connected with the VBOX 3i data logger of Racelogic has been used as the ground truth.