Data Acquisition Model for Road Profiling and Its Statistical Validation

Abstract

Road profile data is often used to test the performance of automotive control designs early in the system design cycle. Road profile data can be either directly measured or it can be estimated using hardware-in-loop or software-in-loop techniques. There is a need to devise a low cost alternative to collect road profile data for testing of semi-active suspension control systems. This paper presents a cost-effective direct road profile measurement system using ultrasonic sensors and embedded microcontroller. Any data collected using different techniques has to be validated using statistical tools before being used. This paper presents 3 Sigma method to identify errors in the data sets with case study and also identify methods of repairing the data sets. Further to check whether the data set is in agreement to the expected distribution, Chi-Square test is used and the results indicate that the hypothesis is true for most data sets.