UMTRI Project

Occupant Classification Anthropomorphic Test Device (OCATD)

Sponsor:
Investigator: Matthew Reed
00/00/0000 - 00/00/0000

The deployment characteristics of airbags can be altered to improve protection if information about the occupant is available to the system. In this project, the anthropometric specifications for new human surrogates representing a six-year-old child and small adult female were developed. The OCATDs have a more compliant flesh, more realistic surface shapes, and larger joint range of motion than crash dummies. As part of this project, the seat surface pressure distributions generated by children and adults were compared to pressure distributions produced by crash dummies and the OCATD. The OCATD produced seat surface pressure distributions that were quantitatively more representative of human occupants than the pressure distributions of Hybrid-III crash dummies. The analysis also examined the extent to which occupant characteristics can be inferred from seat surface pressure distribution.