An active acceleration system to mitigate/avoid underride rear-end crashes

Rear-end crashes involving heavy trucks as the leading vehicle, and cars as the impact vehicle, cause many deaths and permanent injuries to cars occupants. Measures have been thus taken in the trucks to prevent underride crashes, including the mounting of stiffer underride guards, set at car s bumper height. In this respect, an active acceleration system (AAS), installed in the truck, could also contribute to mitigate the effects of these crashes, through the decrease of the relative speed of the vehicles at the instant of the crash. In this paper, an AAS system is proposed, under the principles of ultrasonic sensors and an actuator for the trucks accelerator mechanism. Simulation results of the operation of this AAS system, suggest that such a system could decrease the relative impact speed around 8% for an initial relative speed of 10 m/s.