The Eurosensors International Conference was held for the 35th time this year in Lecce, Italy, and will take place in Debrecen next year. A poster prepared in collaboration by HUN-REN Institute for Computer Science and Control (HUN-REN SZTAKI), HUN-REN Centre for Energy Research – Institute of Technical Physics and Materials Science (MFA) and ELTE Faculty of Informatics (ELTE IK) was chosen as one of the best of the conference. The award-winning research results are related to vehicle control applications of force sensors built into car tyres and the development of intelligent wheels.

The collaboration between the three institutes, in which the different areas of competence complement each other well, started back in 2021. The force sensor was developed by researchers at the MFA Nanosensors Laboratory and has already been successfully integrated into surgical robots with the aim of providing a tactile sensation to surgeons performing operations. The integration of the sensor into a tyre is a new research direction aiming at developing practical applications for solving autonomous vehicle control tasks (e.g. environment sensing, terrain-adapted control, wheel slip detection). However, the magnitude of the forces acting in the tyre is significantly different compared to those usual in surgical interventions, thus the sensor needs to be provided with anti-breakage coatings. These coatings modify the change in electrical resistance measured during wheel deformation in a non-linear way, which also depends on the environmental conditions (wheel pressure, temperature, etc.). In order to determine the mathematical relationship between the ground forces acting on the wheel and the data measured by the sensor, model-driven neural networks have been developed by the Signals and Systems Research Group at the Department of Numerical Analysis at ELTE IK. This is a new and rapidly developing area of Explainable AI research, which combines mathematical model-based approaches and data-driven artificial intelligence tools. The data necessary for training the networks was provided by the staff of Systems and Control Research Laboratory at HUN-REN SZTAKI, who carried out measurements under real-world conditions by installing the sensor in various test vehicles.

As a result of the joint research, a poster [1], a conference paper [2], and a D1 journal publication [3] have been published so far. The researchers are currently investigating wheel sensor-based estimation of ground forces acting on the car’s wheels and the adhesion friction, which is expected to result in a patent application. MSc students can also join the research through the Modelling R&D Lab at the Department of Numerical Analysis.

[1] Bársony, I., Dózsa, T., Nagy, A., Braun, F., Simonyi, E., Battistig, G., Radó, J., Soumelidis, A. Kovács, P., Volk, J., Tire Deformation Monitoring Sensor for Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems, 35th Eurosensors Conference, 2023.

[2] Dózsa, T., Ámon, A., Braun, F., Simonyi, E., Soumelidis, A., Volk, J., Kovács, P., Towards intelligent tire development, Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Transport Sciences, pp. 1–12, Győr, 2023.

[3] Dózsa, T., Radó J., Volk, J., Kisari, A., Soumelidis, A., Kovács, P., Road abnormality detection using piezoresistive force sensors and adaptive signal models, IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement, 2022, vol. 71, pp. 1-11.