Occupant Protection and Rescue using Automotive Cyber-Physical Systems

The current trend in the automotive industry is the expanded use of embedded electronics connected to physical sensors and actuators in an effort to increase the functionality, robustness, and safety of new vehicles. Automotive safety, in an effort to prevent crashes and to protect the occupants in emergency situations, provides an ideal application for emerging innovations in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). The majority of current CPSs have been focused on crash avoidance with enhanced vehicle controllability and stability (e.g., automatic braking systems and traction control systems.) and driver warning systems for potentially dangerous situations (e.g. lane departure, lane shift warnings, etc.). While the active safety measures mentioned above are playing a significant role in reducing traffic accidents, the current numbers of crash-involved vehicles remains high (17 million crashes involving 28 million vehicles [1] ). Thus, augmentation of existing CPS effort through improvements in occupant protection during the crash and rescue post-crash could significantly reduce the huge societal burden represented by the traffic accidents ($112 billion economic cost annually in US-[1]).