Are EDR Devices Undoubtedly Helpful in the Reconstruction of a Road Traffic Accident?

Marek Guzek and Zbigniew Lozia
Additional contact information
Marek Guzek: Faculty of Transport, Warsaw University of Technology, 00-662 Warsaw, Poland
Zbigniew Lozia: Faculty of Transport, Warsaw University of Technology, 00-662 Warsaw, Poland

Energies, 2021, vol. 14, issue 21, 1-25

Abstract: All over the world, the vehicles introduced now into the market are usually provided with EDRs (Event Data Recorders), intended to measure and record the parameters that characterise the vehicle motion in the pre-, during-, and post-accident phases. The EDRs are to facilitate the description and reconstruction of possible road accidents. They are patterned on aircraft “black boxes” (flight recorders). Many of them have simplified design, disregarding three (of six) vector components that describe the motion of the vehicle body solid. In the paper presented, the authors used simulation models built by themselves to represent motor vehicle dynamics and the reconstruction of vehicle trajectory and velocities based on records obtained from two EDR types: “aircraft” one (EDR1) and “simplified” one (EDR2). Using a simulation method, they examined the impact of the said simplifications mentioned above on the quality of reconstruction of vehicle motion for four typical manoeuvres in road traffic. The calculation results obtained for input data adopted to rep-resent a medium-class passenger car have shown that the simplifications may cause considerable reconstruction errors. This particularly applies to the manoeuvres where significant changes took place in the roll and pitch angles of the vehicle body solid (to which the EDR was fixed) or where the changes were characterised by absence of symmetry in the parameters that describe the manoeuvre and by the constant sign of the vehicle body roll angles.

Keywords: EDR; accident reconstruction; vehicle dynamics; vehicle motion reconstruction; road accidents (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/21/6940/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/21/6940/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:14:y:2021:i:21:p:6940-:d:662081

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().