When we drive, our safety is protected by technologies that watch over the car’s behaviour. The Electronic Stability Control (ESC) is the most impactful safety technology in cars, having reduced by around 40% the number of fatal accidents caused by the vehicle’s loss of control. Any ESC on the market suffer from one flaw: they cannot directly measure the sideslip angle, which is the key indicator of skidding, namely the situation when the car deviates from the driver’s direction. To real time assess whether a vehicle is losing control, the ESC collects data from the sensors in the car, adopting approximate strategy that doesn’t control the vehicle skid, but its yaw rate. There is currently no sensor that can measure in real time the sideslip angle in a commercial car, and that is why present ESC technologies are focused on the vehicle yaw-rate control. As a result ESC can detect only up to 80% of skidding events, thus still leaving room for improvements that can save lives. Modelway has developed Skidless, a machine learning technology able to accurately estimate the vehicle’s sideslip angle in real time, without adding any new sensor to the car. The key is the proprietary and patented Direct Virtual Sensor technology, which can be embedded in standard ESC units to further improve the vehicle’s capacity to detect a skidding event. Skidless can provide up to 20% more accurate estimation of the sideslip angle, giving accurate estimations in presence of operating condition changes (i.e. dry/wet road, tires status, car load). This allows increasing the safety of vehicles regardless of the road conditions and driving style, improve the performances in vehicle control, becoming an essential ingredient for the next generation car safety systems.
During Phase 1 we collected requirements from OEMs and Tier1s for integration of the Skidless software, realized a lab-scale demonstrator emulating the software in an use case scenario, and performed a standard compliance analysis in order to obtain certifications. We assessed the size of the market, and defined a business model based on a licence fee. The marketing strategy is based on direct contacts of prospective customers, by initially focusing on high-end and sport vehicles. The Phase 1 project has been key for demonstrating the feasibility of the system implementation, enabling a co-development effort with OEMs and global ESC manufacturers and leading to a pre-commercial validation test-beds, which will be pursued in the view of the commercialization in 2022.
