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Advancing active safety towards the protection of vulnerable road users: the PROSPECT project
(2017)
Accidents involving Vulnerable Road Users (VRU) are still a very significant issue for road safety. According to the World Health Organisation, pedestrian and cyclist deaths account for more than 25% of all road traffic deaths worldwide. Autonomous Emergency Braking Systems have the potential to improve safety for these VRU groups. The PROSPECT project (Proactive Safety for Pedestrians and Cyclists) aims to significantly improve the effectiveness of active VRU safety systems compared to those currently on the market by expanding the scope of scenarios addressed by the systems and improving the overall system performance. The project pursues an integrated approach: Newest available accident data combined with naturalistic observations and HMI guidelines represent key inputs for the system specifications, which form the basis for the system development. For system development, two main aspects are considered: advanced sensor processing with situation analysis, and intervention strategies including braking and steering. All these concepts are implemented in several vehicle prototypes. Special emphasis is put on balancing system performance in critical scenarios and avoiding undesired system activations. For system validation, testing in realistic scenarios will be done. Results will allow the performance assessment of the developed concepts and a cost-benefit analysis. The findings within the PROSPECT project will contribute to the generation of state -of-the-art knowledge, technical innovations, assessment methodologies and tools for advancing Advanced Driver Assistance Systems towards the protection of VRUs. The introduction of a new generation safety system in the market will enhance VRU road safety in 2020-2025, contributing to the "Vision Zero" objective of no fatalities or serious injuries in road traffic set out in the Transport White Paper. Furthermore, the test methodologies and tools developed within the project shall be considered for the New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP) future roadmaps, supporting the European Commission goal of halving the road toll in the 2011-2020 timeframe.
PROSPECT (Proactive Safety for Pedestrians and Cyclists) is a collaborative research project involving most of the relevant partners from the automotive industry (including important active safety vehicle manufacturers and tier-1 suppliers) as well as academia and independent test labs, funded by the European Commission in the Horizon 2020 research program. PROSPECT's primary goal is the development of novel active safety functions, to be finally demonstrated to the public in three prototype vehicles. A sound benefit assessment of the prototype vehicle's functionality requires a broad testing methodology which goes beyond what has currently been used. Since PROSPECT functions are developed to prevent accidents in intersections, a key aspect of the test methodology is the reproduction of natural driving styles on the test track with driving robots. For this task, data from a real driving study with subjects in a suburb of Munich, Germany was used. Further data from Barcelona will be available soon. The data suggests that intersection crossing can be broken down into five phases, two phases with straight deceleration / acceleration, one phase with constant radius and speed turning, and two phases where the bend is imitated or ended. In these latter phases, drivers mostly combine lateral and longitudinal accelerations and drive what is called a clothoid, a curve with curvature proportional to distance travelled, in order to change lateral acceleration smoothly rather than abrupt. The data suggests that the main parameter of the clothoid, the ratio distance travelled to curvature, is mostly constant during the intersections. This parameter together with decelerations and speeds allows the generation of synthetic robot program files for a reproduction of natural driving styles using robots, allowing a much greater reproducibility than what is possible with human test drivers. First tests show that in principle it is possible to use the driving robots for vehicle control in that manner; a challenge currently is the control performance of the robot system in terms of speed control, but it is anticipated that this problem will be solved soon. Further elements of the PROSPECT test methodology are a standard intersection marking to be implemented on the test track which allows the efficient testing of all PROSPECT test cases, standard mobile and light obstruction elements for quick reproduction of obstructions of view, and a concept for tests in realistic surroundings. First tests using the PROSPECT test methodology will be conducted over the summer 2017, and final tests of the prototype vehicles developed within PROSPECT will be conducted in early 2018