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In order to provide an improved countermeasure for occupant protection, a new type of active reversible preload seatbelt (ARPS) is presented in this paper. The ARPS is capable of protecting occupants by reducing injuries during frontal collisions. ARPS retracts seatbelt webbing by activating an electric motor attached to the seatbelt retractor. FCW (Forward Collision Warning) and LDW (Lane Departure Warning) provide signals as a trigger to activate the electric motor to retract the seatbelt webbing, thus making the occupant restraint system work more effectively in a crash. It also helps reduce occupant’s forward movement during impact process via braking. Four important factors such as preload force, preload velocity and the length and timing of webbing retraction play influential roles in performance of the ARPS. This paper focuses on studying preload performance of ARPS under various test conditions to investigate effects of the aforementioned factors.

The combination of passive and active vehicle safety technologies can effectively improve vehicle safety. Most of them predict vehicle crashes using radar or video, but they can't be applied extensively currently due to the high cost. Another collision forecasting method is more economic which is based on the driver behavior and vehicle status, such as the acceleration, angular velocity of the brake pedal and so on. However, the acceleration and angular velocity of the brake pedal will change with the driver and the vehicle type. In order to study the effect of different drivers and vehicle types on the braking acceleration and angular velocity of the brake pedal, six volunteers were asked to drive five vehicles for simulating the working conditions of emergency braking, normal braking, inching braking and passing barricades under different velocities. All the tests were conducted on asphalt road, and comprehensive experimental design was used to arrange tests.