CRASH DISCRIMINATOR RESPONSIVE TO EARLY-CRUSH AND MULTIPLE-HIT SCENARIOS

摘要

In a system (30) and method for controlling actuation of a vehicle passenger safety device in response to an event possibly requiring actuation of the safety device, stored (34) and rank-ordered values (36) for received vehicle acceleration are used to generate (38) a high-rank jerk measure (jH), a median-ranked acceleration value (aM) and a median-rank velocity measure (vM), while raw acceleration information is further used to generate (40) an "event-based timer" or event-progress measure (t'). These measures (jH, aM, vM, t') are then used to generate (52 and 60) a pair of event-identification measures (m1, m2) useful in identifying two specific crash types for which specialized acceleration-based event-severity measures other than the default even-severity measure (m0) are best suited, specifically, where a series of negative jerks occuring relatively early in an event from a high transitory acceleration identify the occurence of a sizable vehicle crush, or where a series of small jerks occuring relatively late in an event above a minimum velocity identifies a "multiple hit" event.