A tyre-mounted chip measures road friction and sends data to vehicle systems for braking, stability control, and autonomous driving.
POLYN Technology has begun delivering its VibroSense TMS chips for assembly into tyre pressure monitoring system (TPMS) sensor nodes. The technology estimates tyre-road friction and can provide vehicles with road-grip information to support braking, electronic stability control, all-wheel drive, and autonomous driving systems.
In a third-party test on wet basalt pavement, a vehicle equipped with VibroSense TMS stopped in 55.5 metres (182 feet) when braking from 40 kilometres per hour (25 mph). Without the system, the stopping distance was 63.2 metres (207 feet), a reduction of 12 per cent.
“A road may look fine, but it isn’t,” said Aleksandr Timofeev, founder and CEO of POLYN. “Today’s braking, stability and driver-assistance systems discover this the same way the driver does, when the wheel is already slipping. Tire-road friction is the last major input in vehicle dynamics that no sensor measures directly. VibroSense TMS changes that.”
The chips process raw data from accelerometers inside tyres to estimate the peak friction coefficient (PFC) between each tyre and the road. The sensor nodes wirelessly transmit this information to the vehicle’s electronic control unit (ECU) as a standard sensor signal. Vehicle systems can use the data to respond to changing road conditions without requiring mechanical changes to the vehicle.
The technology can be used with tyres from any brand, although each new tyre type requires calibration to identify its specific vibration pattern. Tyre manufacturers, vehicle original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), chassis system suppliers, and advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) and autonomous driving providers can now evaluate the sensor nodes.
Processing accelerometer data inside a rotating tyre using artificial intelligence (AI) was long considered impractical for mass-market devices. The chip enables vehicles to use information about road conditions detected by their tyres.
“For tyre manufacturers, ADAS companies, and automotive OEMs, VibroSense TMS has the potential to be an always-on source of information about real-time road-tire interaction at any given moment. This opens new opportunities for these companies to improve their safety functions, removing uncertainty in some situations and enabling faster decisions by smart vehicle systems,” Timofeev said.
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