Modeling Active Human Muscle Responses during Driver and Autonomous Avoidance Maneuvers

Other conference contribution, 2014

Integration of pre-crash and in-crash safety systems has a potential to further reduce car occupant fatalities and to mitigate injuries. However, the introduction of integrated safety systems creates new requirements for Human Body Models (HBMs) as occupant kinematics must be predicted for a longer period of time, in order to evaluate the effect of systems activated before the crash phase. For this purpose, a method to model car occupant muscle responses in a finite element (FE) HBM have been developed, utilizing feedback control of Hill-type muscle elements. The model has been applied to study occupant kinematics under the influence of autonomous and driver braking deceleration. Ongoing work aims at extending the model to be able to also capture human responses to lateral and oblique pre-crash loading.