Tires · FlexRay

Vehicle data analytics and wireless data transfer from cars

The problem

Road safety depends on many factors, but everything ultimately rests on the contact between the tire and the road: without grip, there is no steering, no braking, no acceleration. To let people experience this first hand, Continental organized a several-week event around vehicle dynamics, bringing together some 2,300 participants — press, manufacturers and dealers — who became test drivers.

At the “Under Pressure” driving station, participants faced a simulation in which the vehicle ahead lost its cargo, forcing them to brake and take evasive action. Different inflation pressures were measured and recorded, and the data transmitted wirelessly from the test car to a server, in order to produce a documented analysis for each driver.

The difficulty: retrieving this data without intervening in the vehicle's complex bus system, and with total reliability, since the tight schedule ruled out repeating a test run.

Online analysis of a lane change: the rear instability felt by the driver is explained by the tire's footprint. The reduced pressure on the rear axle can no longer build up the necessary lateral force.

The solution

Continental turned to HMS's Ixxat solutions. The embedded platform selected consolidates several buses in a single device and handles different protocols natively, which made it ideal for this implementation.

The data was extracted by FlexRay-to-CAN gateways installed in the vehicle, with their configuration and analysis tools, then transmitted wirelessly to be processed and visualized externally. A purely CAN-based solution was dismissed straight away: it would have required a vehicle less suited to the tests, making the dynamics simulation considerably harder. The instruments recording the vehicle movement data were placed in the trunk.

“The solution included the FRC-EP190 and FRC-EP170 hardware components together with Ixxat's gateway configuration software. In approximately five months, we implemented the measurement technology including the wireless solution,” explains Nels von Schnakenburg, Section Manager of Technical Event Management at Continental. Christian Cramer, from Test Method Development, adds: “The time advantage is decisive compared with all the other solutions we know of. Add to that modularity and flexibility, the wide temperature range — essential for on-board use —, data quality, intuitive FlexRay to CAN conversion, logging functionality, platform-independent visualization and sustainable extensions, notably to CAN FD.”

“The time schedule was perfectly met and the interaction of the components with the designated vehicle was perfect. In numbers: 20 man-months compared with 80 without the Ixxat solutions, that is roughly 9,600 saved working hours, which also benefited the budget.”

The result