doi:10.1155/2016/1740854engLuque, P.Mantaras, D.A.Rodriguez, A.Malón, H.Castejón, L.Jalón, J.G.Lopez, J.L.Martin, A.Low-Cost Monitoring System of Sensors for Evaluating Dynamic Solicitations of Semitrailer StructureART-2016-102660Analysis of the fatigue life of a semitrailer structure necessitates identification of the loads and dynamic solicitations in the structure. These forces can be introduced in computer simulation software (multibody + finite element) for analysing the response of different design solutions to them.These numerical models must be validated and some parameters need to be measured directly in a field test with real vehicles under various driving conditions. In this study, a low-cost monitoring system is developed for application to a real fleet of semitrailers. According to the definition of the numerical model, the guidance of a virtual vehicle is defined by the three-dimensional kinematics of the kingpin. For characterisation of these movements, a monitoring system having a lowcost inertial measurement unit (IMU) and global positioning system (GPS) antennas is developed with different configurations to enable analysis of the best cost-benefit (result accuracy) solution, and an extended Kalman filter (EKF) that characterises the kinematic guidance of the kingpin is proposed. A semitrailer was equipped with the experimental low-cost monitoring systemand high-precision sensors (IMU, GPS) in order to validate the results obtained by the experimental low-cost monitoring system and the inertial-extended Kalman filter developed.The validated system has applicability in the low-cost monitoring of a fleet of real vehicles.2016http://zaguan.unizar.es/record/6343610.1155/2016/1740854http://zaguan.unizar.es/record/63436oai:zaguan.unizar.es:63436info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/MINECO/TRA2012-38826Journal of Sensors 2016 (2016), 1740854 [15 pp]byhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess