Alternative Sensor System and MLP Neural Network for Vehicle Pedal Activity Estimation

Abstract

It is accepted that the activity of the vehicle pedals (i.e., throttle, brake, clutch) reflects the driver’s behavior, which is at least partially related to the fuel consumption and vehicle pollutant emissions. This paper presents a solution to estimate the driver activity regardless of the type, model, and year of fabrication of the vehicle. The solution is based on an alternative sensor system (regime engine, vehicle speed, frontal inclination and linear acceleration) that reflects the activity of the pedals in an indirect way, to estimate that activity by means of a multilayer perceptron neural network with a single hidden layer.

Keywords

• brake estimator
• clutch estimator
• throttle estimator
• pedals activity estimation
• multilayer perceptron
• ANN estimator
• on-board sensorial system