Estimation of a Speed Hump Profile Using Quarter Car Model

In the past few years, the topics concerning vehicular communications have been in conducting researches. One research topic is to acquire important information (e.g., traffic conditions, weather conditions) necessary to disseminate to car drivers. Road profile information is very important information that the drivers who know this in advance can use to avoid accidents. Speed hump on a road, which is one of the road profile information, can cause an accident especially at night if a driver has never passed through the road before. This paper proposes a technique to estimate speed hump profile using quarter car model. In this technique, two acceleration sensors are needed to install at sprung mass and unsprung mass of a car. The signals of the two sensors are then passed through the estimation model to get the speed hump profile in time unit (i.e., height versus time). To obtain the speed hump profile in space unit (i.e., height versus distance), the information of car velocities while passing the speed hump is required. Simulation results from Simulink confirm that the proposed technique can estimate speed hump profile accurately.