Publication

Abstract : Two-wheeler crashes account for a disproportionate share of road fatalities because motorcycles lack the passive safety features common in cars. This paper presents a real-time airbag deployment system that runs on an ESP32 dual-core microcontroller under FreeRTOS. A two-stage verification combines an MPU6050 inertial sensor with an infrared proximity sensor to suppress false triggers, while an interrupt-driven panic button provides manual override. Tasks are organised with priority-based scheduling, binary semaphores, and a mutex-protected alert device to guarantee deterministic behaviour under concurrent loads. We instrument FreeRTOS and report four key runtime metrics: task execution time, context-switch latency, end-to-end event latency, and jitter. In the worst case, context switches complete in 160 μs and end-to-end latency does not exceed 18 μs, validating the platform for time-critical actuation. A prototype guardian attached to a test bike deployed the airbag within 7 ms of a simulated collision without spurious firings. These results demonstrate that low-cost microcontrollers, when paired with a carefully profiled RTOS, can deliver automotive-grade safety features for resource-constrained two-wheelers.