Road accident reconstruction is an issue which involves multiple and differentiated subjects. A collision contours’ determination requires the investigation and the analysis of all the evidence provided from highly distinct sources and remaining from uncertain and, sometimes, chaotic scenarios. People are vastly involved in traffic accident situations, either being drivers, victims, injured or witnesses. Therefore, accident investigation is a sensitive matter which requires objectiveness, accuracy, efficiency, and effectiveness, to draw faithful and factual conclusions about the collisions’ contours. The accidents reconstruction science’s main objective is to determine and describe the involved vehicles dynamics, which is accomplished by collecting and interconnect all the available evidence extracted from the impacts’ scenarios, from the vehicles, and from the involved people.
In the past, many authors developed mathematical models which describe, approximately, the vehicles’ dynamics involved in a road traffic collision. Over the years, with the technology evolution and the advances on the area, multiple solutions have been created and enhanced to provide to accident reconstructionists better and more reliable evidence, allowing them to perform crash reconstructions with higher accuracy. These solutions include numerical methods, simulation and evaluation software, and tools for evidence collection. However, the introduction of the Event Data Recorder (EDR) on the vehicles consists of a great progression concerning the availability of valid and meaningful clues which can be used as inputs for the scientific crash reconstruction, since the EDR stores data that was unavailable and was difficult to deduce from the accident’s remaining evidence, previously.
On the scope of this project, a vehicle data logging device was developed and tested regarding the validation of the EDR’s recorded data. The device’s purpose is to acquire the most relevant variables for crash reconstruction, which are also stored by the EDR, and provide a source of information for comparison and validation. This device was integrated with the respective sensors, programmed with a developed software, and tested on a vehicle. The tests for dynamic data acquisition consisted of travelling a defined path around the school campus, since there was not the opportunity to perform a real crash test with an EDR equipped vehicle
