Low-Cost Monitoring System of Sensors for Evaluating Dynamic Solicitations of Semitrailer Structure

Analysis of the fatigue life of a semitrailer structure necessitates identification of the loads and dynamic solicitations in the structure. these forces can be introduced in computer simulation software (multibody + finite element) for analysing the response of different design solutions to them. these numerical models must be validated and some parameters need to be measured directly in a field test with real vehicles under various driving conditions. in this study,a low-cost monitoring system is developed for application to a real fleet of semitrailers. according to the definition of the numerical model,the guidance of a virtual vehicle is defined by the three-dimensional kinematics of the kingpin. for characterisation of these movements,a monitoring system having a low-cost inertial measurement unit (imu) and global positioning system (gps) antennas is developed with different configurations to enable analysis of the best cost-benefit (result accuracy) solution,and an extended kalman filter (ekf) that characterises the kinematic guidance of the kingpin is proposed. a semitrailer was equipped with the experimental low-cost monitoring system and high-precision sensors (imu,gps) in order to validate the results obtained by the experimental low-cost monitoring system and the inertial-extended kalman filter developed. the validated system has applicability in the low-cost monitoring of a fleet of real vehicles. � 2016 pablo luque et al.