Safe Detection of Wheels Spinning and Sliding in Vehicles

The vehicle industry’s primary theme is the increase in automating and integrating more robust intelligent electronic systems to transform towards Industry 4.0, enhance safe functioning with more flexibility, and extend the virtual productive age of the vehicular systems. Further, significant efforts focus on developing monitoring systems for abnormal driving conditions such as wheel spinning and sliding that can increase the operating environment’s hazards and speed up the wearing-off process. Thus, these events play a primary role in influencing the safety of the involved humans and determining the vehicle’s lifespan and the incurred maintenance costs because of the encumbrances by the generated vibrations and shocks. However, the existing measurement systems are not entirely digitized, and their initial development did not concern the concept of functional safety like redundancy to be used in safety-critical environments. Further, the current systems depend on a costly sensory system that requires strict and complex installation procedures. Therefore, the prevention of wheel spinning and sliding events by a safety-related miniaturized digital intelligent monitoring system comes to a corresponding meaning. Accordingly, this research work investigates the development of a novel safety-related platform following the standard IEC 61508 for monitoring and controlling abnormal driving conditions through vibration sensors incorporated with rotation sensors. The research work tests the novel system on a prototype vehicle where the conducted experiments prove the system’s capability to detect the events with reasonable accuracy. Further, this novel approach’s evaluation shows that the system represents a significant enhancement for various similar researches and applications.