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From an athlete’s perspective, the identification of falls during rock climbing is of major importance. It constitutes a solid performance indicator, but more importantly, it could be used to trigger an instantaneous alarm to rescue teams, thus reducing the negative health consequences for the climber. In this context, an artificial neural network–based technique for fall detection during rock climbing is presented in this study. The output of this tool could be used for safety and performance monitoring purposes. The proposed method exploits a neural network for binary pattern recognition. This network is fed with a set of features extracted in real time from the acceleration and altitude signals acquired by means of a wearable device. The classifier is trained and validated with experimental datasets recorded during real climbing sessions of eight athletes through different route grades and conditions. This article illustrates the architecture of the proposed algorithm, feature extraction process, and evaluation of its accuracy. In addition, an analysis of the severity level of the detected falls is conducted. The method is able to identify real fall events with a high success rate, while yielding very few false positive indications of a fall.

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This paper presents a tradeoff analysis in terms of accuracy and computational cost between different architectures of artificial neural networks for the State of Charge (SOC) estimation of lithium batteries in hybrid and electric vehicles. The considered layouts are partly selected from the literature on SOC estimation, and partly are novel proposals that have been demonstrated to be effective in executing estimation tasks in other engineering fields. One of the architectures, the Nonlinear Autoregressive Neural Network with Exogenous Input (NARX), is presented with an unconventional layout that exploits a preliminary routine, which allows setting of the feedback initial value to avoid estimation divergence. The presented solutions are compared in terms of estimation accuracy, duration of the training process, robustness to the noise in the current measurement, and to the inaccuracy on the initial estimation. Moreover, the algorithms are implemented on an electronic control unit in serial communication with a computer, which emulates a real vehicle, so as to compare their computational costs. The proposed unconventional NARX architecture outperforms the other solutions. The battery pack that is used to design and test the networks is a 20 kW pack for a mild hybrid electric vehicle, whilst the adopted training, validation and test datasets are obtained from the driving cycles of a real car and from standard profiles.

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This paper presents a controller dedicated to the lateral and longitudinal vehicle dynamics control for autonomous driving. The proposed strategy exploits a Model Predictive Control strategy to perform lateral guidance and speed regulation. To this end, the algorithm controls the steering angle and the throttle and brake pedals for minimizing the vehicle’s lateral deviation and relative yaw angle with respect to the reference trajectory, while the vehicle speed is controlled to drive at the maximum acceptable longitudinal speed considering the adherence and legal speed limits. The technique exploits data computed by a simulated camera mounted on the top of the vehicle while moving in different driving scenarios. The longitudinal control strategy is based on a reference speed generator, which computes the maximum speed considering the road geometry and lateral motion of the vehicle at the same time. The proposed controller is tested in highway, interurban and urban driving scenarios to check the performance of the proposed method in different driving environments.

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This paper presents a technique for the estimation of the sideslip angle and longitudinal speed of a high-performance four-wheel drive vehicle by means of Artificial Neural Networks. The proposed architecture relies on the combination of a pattern recognition neural classifier with two stages of cascaded regression neural networks. The classifier allows identifying the road condition and the regression stages perform the two estimation tasks. The networks are trained by means of datasets recorded on an instrumented vehicle. The strategy is tested in different road adherence conditions, namely dry, wet and icy, and in a variety of driving maneuvers. The effectiveness of the technique is demonstrated experimentally by deploying the algorithm on the vehicle and comparing the sideslip angle estimation with the measurement computed by an optical sensor and the longitudinal speed estimation with both the estimation already present on the vehicle and obtained as the mean value of the wheels’ velocity and with the optical sensor measurement.