Data-driven detection methods on driver’s pedal action intensity using triboelectric nano-generators

Driver’s driving actions on pedals can be regarded as an expression of driver’s acceleration/deceleration intention. Quickly and accurately detecting driving action intensity on pedals can have great contributions in preventing road traffic accidents and managing the energy consumption. In this paper, we report a pressure-sensitive and self-powered material named triboelectric nano-generators (TENGs). The generated voltage data of TENGs, which is associated with the pedal action, can be collected easily and stored sequentially. According to the characteristics of the voltage data, we have employed a hybrid machine learning method. After collecting signals from TENGs and driving simulator simultaneously, an unsupervised Gaussian mixture model is used to cluster the pedal events automatically using data from simulator. Then, multi-feature candidates of the voltage data from TENGs are extracted and ranked. A supervised random forest model that treats voltage data of TENGs as input data is trained and tested. Results show that data from TENGs can have a high accuracy of more than 90% using the random forest algorithm. The evaluating results demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed data-driven hybrid learning algorithm for recognition of driver’s pedal action intensity. Furthermore, technical and economic characteristics of TENGs and some common sensors are compared and discussed. This work may demonstrate the feasibility of using these data-driven methods on the detection of driver’s pedal action intensity.