Patent ID: 7415337

Claim:
A method of detecting an impact of a vehicle with a pedestrian, comprising the steps of: sensing deflections of a vehicle body panel at distributed sensing locations on said body panel; identifying peak changes in the sensed deflection at each sensing location during impacts between said body panel and test objects of diverse shape and diverse mass at different impact speeds and sensing locations; storing the identified peak changes in sensed deflection to form a body of baseline calibration data categorized by impact location, impact speed, test object mass, and test object shape; detecting an impact between said body panel and an unknown object when the deflection sensed at one or more of said distributed sensing locations exceeds a threshold, and designating an impact location as the sensing location with highest deflection; determining an impact speed between said body panel and said unknown object; retrieving baseline calibration data corresponding to the designated impact location and the determined impact speed; correlating peak changes in the sensed deflections due to the detected impact with the retrieved baseline calibration data to determine a shape and a mass of said unknown object; and determining if said unknown object is a pedestrian based in part on the determined shape and the determined mass.