Estimating Vehicle Speed with Embedded Inertial Sensors

摘要

This study deals with pavements instrumented with inertial sensors; it investigates both numerically and experimentally the possibility of estimating the speed of a passing vehicle from the measurements of two embedded accelerometers. The sensors are spaced apart in the travel direction, and subsequently the sought after speed is directly related to the time delay between the received signals; no assumption is made regarding the vehicle and pavement properties. Model accelerations are presented, studied, and contrasted against field measurements; the latter are shown to be dominated by random vibration sources. Two calculation techniques are offered and applied to handle the noisy data. The first is based on timecentroids, and the second is based on cross-correlation with kernel presmoothing. The overall concept is deemed promising not only for inferring speeds but also for extracting additional traffic characteristics such axle spacing and relative axle load distributions.