Road Abnormality Detection Using Piezoresistive Force Sensors and Adaptive Signal Models

Intelligent tires can be used for a wide array of applications ranging from tire pressure monitoring to analyzing tire/road interactions, wheel loading, and tread wear monitoring. In this article, we develop a measurement system for intelligent tires equipped with a 3-D piezoresistive force sensor. The output of the sensor is segmented into tire revolution cycles, which are then represented by a transformation relying on adaptive Hermite functions. The underlying idea behind this step is to extract relevant features which capture tire dynamics. Then we evaluate the proposed measurement system in a potential vehicle application, that is, abnormal road surface detection. We deal with the corresponding binary classification problem by developing both low-complexity analytical and data-driven machine learning algorithms, which are tested on real-world measurement data. Our experiments showed that the proposed methods are able to detect abnormalities on the road surface with a mean accuracy of over 97%.