Abstract
Measuring friction between the tyres of a vehicle and the road, often and on as many locations on the road network as possible, can be a valuable tool for ensuring traffic safety. Rather than by using specialised equipment for sequential measurements, this can be achieved by using several low-cost measuring devices on vehicles that travel on the road network as part of their daily assignments. The presented work proves the hypothesis that a low cost measuring device can be built and can provide measurement results comparable to those obtained from expensive specialised measuring devices. As a proof of concept, two copies of a prototype device, based on the Raspberry Pi single-board computer, have been developed, built and tested. They use accelerometers to measure vehicle braking deceleration and include a global positioning receiver for obtaining the geolocation of each test. They run custom-developed data acquisition software on the Linux operating system and provide automatic measurement data transfer to a server. The operation is controlled by an intuitive user interface consisting of two illuminated physical pushbuttons. The results show that for braking tests and friction coefficient measurements the developed prototypes compare favourably to a widely used professional vehicle performance computer.
Highlights
The knowledge of friction conditions on the contact between the road surface and the tyres of the vehicles driving on it is of essential importance for ensuring traffic safety [1,2]
The measurement of skid resistance can be a challenge from two different standpoints: the first is the fact that the required specialised equipment is often expensive and of limited availability, and the second is the fact that the values obtained by different measurement methods are not comparable to each other as many of them do not directly measure the friction forces but rather other quantities that are used in more or less complicated models to calculate the friction coefficients
The final version of the prototype device will be used in brake tests that will follow the same procedure of full braking of a vehicle from an initial speed to a complete stop
Summary
The knowledge of friction conditions on the contact between the road surface and the tyres of the vehicles driving on it is of essential importance for ensuring traffic safety [1,2]. The measurement of skid resistance can be a challenge from two different standpoints: the first is the fact that the required specialised equipment is often expensive and of limited availability, and the second is the fact that the values obtained by different measurement methods are not comparable to each other as many of them do not directly measure the friction forces but rather other quantities that are used in more or less complicated models to calculate the friction coefficients. Some of those methods are described in [1,2]. Whenever the specialised equipment for skid resistance measurement is required, it is often difficult to perform measurements on critical locations in a timely manner (e.g., during sudden changes of weather conditions)
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