Quote:
Originally Posted by The_bluester
I thought it was interesting that the Mercedes guys are using telemetered settings to communicate back to the pit wall about things like tyre condition. A good way to feed back useful data without broadcasting it to all your competitors.
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Hi Paul,
All the teams do that.
The cars are fitted with hundreds of sensors that wirelessly stream telemetry
data. Under FIA rules the flow of data can only be from the car to the team.
The data is compressed and encrypted and the networking infrastructure
is shared by the teams.
With the sensors taking measurements every couple of milliseconds the
amount of streaming data from one car in a race would be in the order of gigabytes.
Apart from the team members on the pit wall and inside the front of the
garage, now and then you will see on TV where they take you into the rooms
at the back of the garage where you will typically see ten or more people
staring at a barrage of computer monitors running realtime analysis of
the data.
The TV commentators often mention that the major teams such as the
likes of Red Bull, Ferrari, McLaren and Mercedes will then typically
have a very large team of people back at the factory in locations
such as the Red Bull F1 headquarters in Milton Keynes in the UK scrutinizing the
data in realtime as well.
With advances in Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) in the past
couple of decades, which are electronic devices with mechanical
parts fabricated on them using semiconductor manufacturing techniques,
the ability to provide a myriad of tiny sensors measuring parameters
such as temperatures, pressures and G-forces has resulted in big
changes in F1 car performance monitoring. Some of these same
breed of sensors are commonly used in applications such as smartphones
which has brought about an economy of scale.
The FIA even stipulates mandatory "accident sensors" that measure
G-forces and report straight back to the medical car in event of a crash.
I was watching a documentary recently where there is a trial of using similar
accident sensors in commodity road cars. When there is a crash, the sensors
determine the impact forces and can even detect how many passengers were
sitting in seats. This data along with your GPS co-ordinates then get automatically
transmitted by the car to the ambulance service and hospital. The trauma unit then
has a better sense of how many people may have sustained injuries and how bad
those injuries may be before the ambulance arrives. With many high speed crashes
resulting in internal organ injury, it is hoped such technology could help the surgeons save
more lives.
