Characteristic Verification and Parameter Optimization of Airbags Cushion System for Airborne Vehicle

Abstract： The major methods to investigate the airbags cushion system are experimental method, thermodynamic method and finite element method （FEM）. Airbags cushion systems are very complicated and very difficult to be investigated thoroughly by such methods For experimental method, it is nearly impossible to completely analyze and optimize the cushion characteristics of airbags of airborne vehicle because of charge issue, safety concern and time constraint. Thermodynamic method fails to take the non-linear effects of large airbag deformation and varied contact conditions into consideration. For finite element method, the FE model is usually complicated and the calculation takes tens of hours of CPU time. As a result, the optimization of the design based on a nonlinear model is very difficult by traditional iterative approach method. In this paper, a model based on FEM and control volume method is proposed to simulate landing cushion process of airborne vehicle with airbags cushion system in order to analyze and optimize the parameters in airbags cushion system. At first, the performance of airbags cushion system model is verified experimentally. In airdrop test, accelerometers are fixed in 4 test points distributed over engine mount, top, bottom and side armor plate of hull to obtain acceleration curves with time. The simulation results are obtained under the same conditions of the airdrop test and the simulation results agree very well with the experimental results, which indicate the established model is valid for further optimization. To optimize the parameters of airbags, equivalent response model based on Latin Hypercube DOE and radial basis function is employed instead of the complex finite element model. Then the optimal results based on equivalent response model are obtained using simulated annealing algorithm. After optimization, the maximal acceleration of airborne vehicle landing reduces 19.83%, while the energy absorption by airbags increases 7.85%. The performance of the airbags cushion system thus is largely improved through optimization, which indicates the proposed method has the capability of solving the parameter optimization problem of airbags cushion system for airborne vehicle.

Road boundary estimation to improve vehicle detection and tracking in UAV video

Video processing is one challenge in collecting vehicle trajectories from unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV) and road boundary estimation is one way to improve the video processing algorithms. However, current methods do not work well for low volume road, which is not well-marked and with noises such as vehicle tracks. A fusion-based method termed Dempster-Shafer-based road detection(DSRD) is proposed to address this issue. This method detects road boundary by combining multiple information sources using Dempster-Shafer theory(DST). In order to test the performance of the proposed method, two field experiments were conducted, one of which was on a highway partially covered by snow and another was on a dense traffic highway. The results show that DSRD is robust and accurate, whose detection rates are 100% and 99.8% compared with manual detection results. Then, DSRD is adopted to improve UAV video processing algorithm, and the vehicle detection and tracking rate are improved by 2.7% and 5.5%,respectively. Also, the computation time has decreased by 5% and 8.3% for two experiments, respectively.