ARTRAC - Advanced Radar Tracking and Classification for Enhanced Road Safety
Overview
Background & policy context:
ARTRAC will contribute to the goals of the European Commission’s Road Safety Programme 2011-2020 concerning improved safety for Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs). Although the ambitious target set in 2001 to halve the number of fatalities by 2010 has not been completely met, significant progress has been made. For example, the number of fatalities is expected to fall by more than 40% (compared to a 25% drop in the preceding decade). It also brought down the average level of road deaths per one million inhabitants from 113 in 2001 to 69 in 2009 for all current 27 EU Member States. For the period from 2011 to 2020 again the goal is set to reduce the number of fatalities on European roads by 50%.
Objectives:
ARTRAC will address the following six major scientific and technical objectives:
- Develop a generic detection system able to detect pedestrians, cyclists, and other vulnerable road users (VRU) as well as vehicles.
- Implement the capability to monitor road surface conditions and detect low-friction road sections caused by water, ice or snow on asphalt. This will be able to be used to warn or adapt the vehicle’s electronic control systems such as electronic stability control (ESC) and collision avoidance systems (CAS) for changed friction conditions.
- Develop an electronically controllable brake and steering force system able to slow down the vehicle and provide a supported evasive manoeuvre. Drivers’ reactions to hazards are too often stereotypic and slow, and their evasive manoeuvres either insufficient or incorrect.
- Provide a totally new safety function based on automatic braking and system-initiated steering recommendation to avoid accidents, or at least mitigate their impact in the event of an unavoidable crash.
- Validate and demonstrate the system functionality by means of pre-defined test scenarios. The prototype will be demonstrated within some “basic” safety applications on two vehicles types, a compact car and a light commercial vehicle.
- Promote the deployment of VRU safety technologies among relevant bodies and stakeholders, including end-users.
Methodology:
ARTRAC started by analysing and consolidating the needs of traffic safety, OEMs and suppliers. In addition previous projects and their results were investigated, in particular the recent PReVENT IPand FRICTION.
This analysis leads to the definition of requirements for the novel sensor and is followed by work to create the sensor architecture and specifications dealing with antenna and multiple channel receiver specification, specification of the actual sensor performance and specification of the applications to be fed by the radar.
After that the actual development work starts, consisting of over 20 different major tasks/sub-tasks needed to realise the new radar prototype. The work is very much composed of parallel and intertwined development of radar hardware, software and performance-related algorithms as well as algorithms needed in vehicle integration. This is followed by verification and testing with all partners involved. The radar prototype will be available in December 2013. After that the integration of the radar prototype into test vehicles may start (one compact car, one light commercial vehicle). After checking functionality, full system tests with all pre-defined scenarios will follow.
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