Ultra-wideband wireless vibration monitoring of off-highway vehicles

Vehicle-to-infrastructure communication applications are more and more common in automotive and off-highway vehicle testing. To perform online wireless vibration monitoring of off-highway vehicles, high-end wireless accelerometers are required that combine a high data rate with a low communication latency. However, such high-end wireless sensors are not easy to find in the market. To address this market need, we have developed a prototype of a high-end wireless vibration sensor node. Our sensor node consists of a digital accelerometer, a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) that acts as the central processing and control unit, and a short-range ultra-wide band (UWB) radio. The sensor node was validated in our lab by performing throughput and latency measurements. As a result we have demonstrated that our high-end wireless sensor node achieves a high throughput of 180Mbps and a low latency of 1ms, while still offering the flexibility to be adapted to different applications.