A smart wheel for improving the active safety of road vehicles

A new lightweight smart wheel has been designed and manufactured. The smart wheel is able to measure the three forces and the three moments acting at the wheel. The wheel is based on an original structural concept and it appears to be rather simple to be implemented in future automobiles. The paper presents the concept and the testing of such a device. The structural part is composed basically by three spokes whose deformations (depending on the forces applied to the wheel) are sensed by means of strain gauges. The strain gauges signals are filtered, amplified and digitally converted and finally wireless transmitted to a remote receiver which can be connected to the vehicle control unit. A particular joint structure, which do realize the physical link between the three spoke structure (wheel hub) and the wheel rim, is designed. The smart-wheel calibration phase is described in the paper. A comprehensive indoor and outdoor experimental phase has been completed, useful to compare the performance of the new sensor with respect to commercial measuring wheels. The performance of the smart wheel fits well the need of improving the active safety of road vehicles. In other terms, the information given by the wheel, allowing to sense the three forces and the three moments, should lead to considerable improvement of the ABS and ESP/VDC performance with respect to today control logics.