Design of MEMS accelerometer based acceleration measurement system for automobiles

Design of an acceleration measurement system using a MEMS accelerometer to measure acceleration of automobiles in all the three axes is presented. Electronic stability control and anti-lock breaking systems in automobiles use the acceleration measurements to offer safety in driving. The system uses an ARM microcontroller to quantize the outputs of accelerometer and save the measurement data on a microSD card. A LabVIEW program has been developed to analyze the longitudinal acceleration measurement data and test the measurement system. Random noises generated and added with measurement data during measurement are filtered by a Kalman filter implemented in LabVIEW. Longitudinal velocity of the vehicle is computed from the measurement data and displayed on a graphical chart. Typical measurement of velocity of a vehicle at different accelerations and decelerations is presented.