Low-Cost Monitoring System of Sensors for Evaluating Dynamic Solicitations of Semitrailer Structure

• Main Authors: Pablo Luque, Daniel A. Mántaras, Aida Rodríguez, Hugo Malón, Luis Castejón, Javier G. Jalón, José L. López, Ángel Martín
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Hindawi Limited 2016-01-01
• Series: Journal of Sensors
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2016/1740854
• ISSN: 1687-725X; 1687-7268

Analysis of the fatigue life of a semitrailer structure necessitates identification of the loads and dynamic solicitations in the structure. These forces can be introduced in computer simulation software (multibody + finite element) for analysing the response of different design solutions to them. These numerical models must be validated and some parameters need to be measured directly in a field test with real vehicles under various driving conditions. In this study, a low-cost monitoring system is developed for application to a real fleet of semitrailers. According to the definition of the numerical model, the guidance of a virtual vehicle is defined by the three-dimensional kinematics of the kingpin. For characterisation of these movements, a monitoring system having a low-cost inertial measurement unit (IMU) and global positioning system (GPS) antennas is developed with different configurations to enable analysis of the best cost-benefit (result accuracy) solution, and an extended Kalman filter (EKF) that characterises the kinematic guidance of the kingpin is proposed. A semitrailer was equipped with the experimental low-cost monitoring system and high-precision sensors (IMU, GPS) in order to validate the results obtained by the experimental low-cost monitoring system and the inertial-extended Kalman filter developed. The validated system has applicability in the low-cost monitoring of a fleet of real vehicles.