Gravity as frame of reference in accelerometer data in iOS

Question

I'm working on an iPhone app for motorcyclist that will detect a crash after it has occurred. Currently we're in the data acquisition process and plotting graphs and looking at data. What i need to log is the forward user acceleration and tilt angle of the bike relative to bike standing upright on the road. I can get the user acceleration vector, i.e. the forward direction the rider is heading by sqrt of the x,y and z accelerometer values squared. But for the tilt angle i need a reference that is constant, so i thought lets use the gravity vector. Now, i realize that deviceMotion API has gravity and user acceleration values, where do these values come from and what do they mean? If i take the sqrt of the x,y and z squared components of the gravity will that always give me my up direct? How can i use that to find the tilt angle of the bike relative to an upright bike on the road? Thanks.

Answer 1

Since this is not a joke.

I would like to address the point of mount issue. How to interpret the data depends largely on how the iPhone is positioned. Some issues might not be apparent to those that don't actually ride motorcycles.

Particularly when it comes to going around curves/corners. In low speed turns the motorcycle leans but the rider does not or just leans slightly. In higher speed turns both the rider and the motorcycle lean. This could present an issue if not addressed. I won't cover all scenarios but..

For example, most modern textile motorcycle jackets have a cell phone pocket just inside on the left. If the user were to put there phone in this pocket, you could expect to see only 'accelerating' & 'braking'(~z) acceleration. In this scenario you would expect to almost never see significant amounts of side to side (~x) acceleration because the rider leans proportionally into the g-force of the turn. So while going around a curve one would expect to see an increase in (y)down from it's general 1g state. So essentially the riders torso is indexed to gravity as far as (x) measurements go.

If the device were mounted to the bike you would have to adjust for what you would expect to see given that mounting point.

As far as the heuristics of the algorithm to detect a crash go, that is very hard to define. Some crashes are like you see on television, bike flips ripping into a million pieces, that crash should be extremely easy to detect, Huh 3gs measured up... Crash! But what about simple downs?(bike lays on it's side, oops, rider gets up, picks up bike rides away) They might occur without any particularly remarkable g-forces.(with the exception of about 1g left or right on the x axis)

A couple more suggestions:

• Sensitivity adjustment, maybe even with some sort of learn mode (where the user puts the device in this mode and rides, the device then records/learns average riding for that user)

• An "I've stopped" or similar button; maybe the rider didn't crash, maybe he/she just broke down, it does happen and since you have some sort of ad-hoc network setup it should be easy to spread the news.

Answer 2

Setting aside "whiy" do this...

You need a very low-pass filter. So once the phone is put wherever-it-rides on the bike, you'll have various accelerations from maneuvers and the accel from gravity ever present in the background. That gives you an on-going vector for "down", and you can then interpret the accel data in that context... Fwd accel would tip the bike opposite of braking, so I think you could sort out fwd direction in real time too.

Very interesting idea.

Answer 3

Assuming that it's not a "joke question" you will need a reference point to compare with i.e. the position taken when the user clicks "starting". Then you can use cos(currentGravity.z / |referenceGravity|) with |referenceGravity| == 1 because Core Motion measures accelerations in g.

But to be honest there are a couple of problems for instance:

• The device has to be in a fixed position when taking the reference frame, if you put it in a pocket and it's just moving a little bit inside, your measurement is rubbish
• Hmm, the driver is dead but device is alive? Chances are good that the iPhone won't survive as well
• If an app goes to the background Core Motion falls asleep and stops delivering values
• It has to be an inhouse app because forget about getting approval for the app store

Or did we misunderstand you and it's just a game?