Boots – shoes – and leggings
Patent
1992-02-28
1994-10-25
Black, Thomas G.
Boots, shoes, and leggings
180271, 280728R, 307 101, B60R 2102
Patent
active
053595157
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates to a vehicle occupant safety system, and in particular, a restraining system such as an airbag, safety-belt tightener or the like, with a sensor device having at least two sensors, a preprocessing device comprising at least two preprocessing circuits, for the sensor signals, a computing system and a trigger circuit, including at least two stages, for a safety device.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
In safety systems such as restraining systems operating on an electronic basis, the critical components, such as sensors, preprocessing circuits, and computers, and in particular, microcomputers for signal processing, may be provided in a redundant fashion, and in particular in duplicate. As a result of the redundancy provided, such known restraining systems provide increased safety. However, this is at the expense of high production costs since a relatively large number of components have to be produced.
If redundancy is omitted in known safety systems, i.e., the system components are simply present once, the costs are indeed lowered, but a lower safety level must then also be assumed. This results from the facts that inappropriate triggerings of the vehicle occupant safety system may not to be ruled out, and that a triggering of the safety system may not occur when it is required.
European No. 0 283 737 describes a circuit arrangement for actuating a protection system for vehicle occupants in which a safety system trigger is disposed in an airbag housing. A plurality of trigger switches are connected in series with one another and in series with the trigger 10, the switches being driven by current sources with are loaded themselves in turn by output signals from logic components. The output signals are fed as a function of the delay of switching double switches to input terminals of the logic components connected in parallel. The functions of the logic components can be taken over by correspondingly programmed microcomputers with corresponding peripherals. In the document, it is also pointed out that for test purposes in each case one part of the trigger switch can be periodically driven at particular intervals, it being also possible for this driving to be carried out by a microprocessor.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The vehicle occupant safety system according to the present invention provides, approximately the same level of safety as a redundancy system and yet saves considerable costs. The cost savings results from the facts that the computing system used is a single-computer system, that is, not a two-computer or multi-computer system, and that the data supplied by the two preprocessing circuits is processed by the same computer (microcomputer) in two programs having staggered timing with respect to one another, to provide a high level of reliability. This leads to a quasi-redundancy. Provided that the information on the two data signal paths coming from the sensors or preprocessing circuits differs considerably from one another, no triggering of the safety system occurs. The information processing is performed solely by one computer which is connected to a two-stage trigger circuit for the safety device. Differences between the information on the two data signal paths or the occurrence of errors lead to, for example, only a single stage of the trigger circuit being activated so that triggering of the safety system cannot occur since, for this purpose, the activation of both stages is required. By means of the single-computer system according to the present invention, not only are the costs lowered but there remains approximately the same level of safety as in a two-computer system because, for example, a fault in the execution of one of the two programs having staggered timing with respect to the other leads to the other program also not being further executable, so that the safety system is not triggered.
It is provided, in particular, that the respective starts of the two programs are initiated by means of two interrupt sources which are independent
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Balzer Knut
Burger Wilfried
Taufer Peter
Weller Hugo
Black Thomas G.
Park Collin W.
Robert & Bosch GmbH
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