Achieving greater safety with EMMA

Relax, work, watch movies: once cars can drive by themselves, drivers can put their commute into work to good use. To make sure that ergonomics and safety don't get overlooked in the process, researchers at the University of Stuttgart, the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics (ITWM) as well as the company fleXstructures (both based in Kaiserslautern) have joined forces to develop a muscle-activated human model which makes it possible to dynamically simulate how driving maneuvers have an impact on the interactions between human soft tissue and the car seat. The German Research Foundation (DFG) is funding the project as part of the new line of trilateral transfer projects. The Baden-Württemberg Minister for Science, Research and the Arts Theresia Bauer congratulates the project partners: "I'm very happy that the University of Stuttgart's project "EMMA4Drive - A Dynamic Human Model for Autonomous Driving" is one of the six projects being supported by the DFG and the Fraunhofer Society. This is further proof of the transfer strength of the University of Stuttgart also with regard to the Stuttgart Way - forward-looking research is being directly applied to a real-life situation and strengthening the cooperation between science and business, which we are also intensively promoting and supporting at state level." Previously, human models have either been used in crash simulations to estimate the risk of injury or in ergonomic analyses. When conducting crash analyses, detailed FE models are used to make calculations at intervals of a few milliseconds, which are very intensive in terms of the computing time required.