Towards preventive and cooperative safety systems:: a case of an intelligent tyre

The goal of APOLLO-project was to create an intelligent tyre for improving road traffic safety. The objectives were: 1) to provide vehicle and tyre manufactures with new products to increase traffic safety 2) to enable improvements for chassis control systems and ADAS 3) to enable the implementation of new services concerning tyre and road conditions for users both inside and outside the vehicle. The functional requirements are to provide a set of data on (i) vertical wheel force or dynamic wheel load and (ii) relative friction available for the application system. Utilising this information the performance of many applications, e.g. roll over avoidance, Anti-lock Braking System, Electronic Stability Programme, Adaptive Cruise Control, can be improved and additional functions can be achieved for driver information and services for external users. After the definition of the reference application, the actual R&D work was split into four blocks of activities: (i) Understanding tyre-vehicle system behaviour (ii) Sub-system development comprising of sensors, power supply and a communication interface (iii) System integration i.e. creating a mechatronic tyre and integrating it into the test vehicle and (iv) Validation to verify sub-systems and the whole Intelligent tyre concept including the final demonstration. The project met most of the objectives set in the Technical Annex. However, the most ambitious and difficult parameter to obtain, available friction could not yet be precisely determined by using the approaches developed. This work will be continued in the a new project aiming at sensor clustering by using also sensors providing information of vehicle dynamics.