Nonlinear Method of Vehicle Velocity Determination Based on Inverse System and Tensor Product of Legendre Polynomials - Intermediate Class

Abstract

Presented paper discusses two different nonlinear approaches to precrash velocity determination for vehicles from Intermediate Car Class. Data that was used to perform analyses introduced in this paper was taken from National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) database. Such database is comprised of substantial number of crash cases and main focus was put on frontal impacts. Hitherto used energy methods are based on linear model which proves to be inaccurate and producing significant errors. Presented considerations concern the inverse system and tensor product of Legendre polynomials. The focus of those methods is to establish the value of nonlinear coefficient which is the slope factor of precrash velocity Vt and deformation ratio Cs function. The application of the least square method provides more precise results in both cases than in previously researched solutions, with a slight advantage of the tensor product method. The obtained mean relative error of the velocity determination using the inverse system method is approximately 16,22% for the linear model and 10,58% for the nonlinear model. In the case of the tensor product method the errors for linear and nonlinear models are respectively 6,74% and 6,3%.