Nissan Motor Company Limited

Airbag Systems Company Ltd

Junichi Ando

Hideo Takai

Hideyuki Kaneko

Shuzo Fukuzumi

Kenji Ikegami

Yukiteru Yamamoto

Tetsuo Fujishima

Akira Ogawa

Masaru Odashima

Takaaki Toya

A passenger detection system is provided to determine if a passenger is present or not because the weight value corresponding to when the seat is empty has shifted. The passenger detection system detects when the door has changed from the closed state to the open state based on a signal from a door switch. The passenger detection system then senses the decrease in weight that occurs thereafter and stores the weight value obtained after the decrease as the empty seat value.

Passenger detection system

An air bag apparatus to be disclosed has an air bag, an air bag driver for performing drive of the air bag to develop the air bag, and an air bag control device for controlling the drive of the air bag driver as a basic arrangement. The air bag control device has an arrangement in which an air bag operation selecting device having information related to selection of an operation state of the air bag driver can be connected to the air bag control device. Further, the air bag control device has a non-volatile storage device, determines a connection state of the air bag operation selecting device to the air bag control device, and stores information related to the determined connection state in the non-volatile storage device.

Air bag apparatus

In an airbag deployment mode selection system, the closer an occupant approaches to an airbag deployment port, the quicker the reflected signal therefrom is received by a reflected signal receiver, a range-finding signal generator being caused to generate subsequent range-finding signals (A,, A,) and so on immediately after the reception of the reflected signals (S,, S,) and so on by the reflected signal receiver. By doing this, the shorter the distance from the airbag deployment port to the occupant is, the shorter is the period for measuring the distance by a distance sensor, thereby accurately measuring the distance from the airbag deployment port to the occupant immediately before the airbag is operated in order to select an appropriate airbag deployment mode.

Airbag deployment mode selection system

A vehicle safety system is equipped with a microcomputer for reliably detecting whether or not programs for controlling activation of passenger protection devices are being properly executed and, based on this detection, preventing problems from occurring in the control operations of the programs. According to one aspect of the invention, the system monitors a program executed on an interrupt basis at prescribed regular time intervals, a repeatedly executed program, and the operations of these programs, synchronously with the execution of the programs, and resets the microcomputer if an error is detected in the execution of either program. According to another, at the time of moving to a subroutine a code peculiar to the subroutine is saved at the entry portion and the saved code is compared with the code peculiar to the executed subroutine at the exit portion for detecting occurrence of error and if error is detected the microcomputer is reset.

Vehicle safety system equipped with microcomputer

Growing community of inventors

Kanagawa-ken, Japan

Junichi Ando