Intelligent adaptive occupant restraint system

Thousands of people die every year in car accidents. Current restraint systems such as conventional seatbelts and airbags are designed to accommodate several occupant/crash scenarios and lack the capability of varying their output during the impact event. This paper introduces and demonstrates the benefits of real time control of a novel adaptive restraint system. Through applying intelligent control techniques, it will be shown in this paper that occupant injuries during frontal crashes can be minimized to much lower levels than what can be achieved today with conventional restraint systems. Our control system will be designed and tested first using a lumped parameter model and second on a complete crash simulation environment.