Overview
About 85 percent of all traffic accidents are attributable to driver distraction, fatigue, and perceptual errors. A large proportion of these accidents could be avoided or at least reduced in severity by active safety systems. In particular, assistance systems can help to prevent accidents typical to urban streets and rural roads – such as accidents occurring at intersections and driveways, accidents resulting from turns and entries, and accidents due to lateral conflicts. In this way, assistance systems will contribute significantly to protect vulnerable road users such as children, pedestrians, and cyclists. The project is part of the research initiative INVENT.
Safety assistance systems that are designed to support the driver during safety-critical driving manoeuvres, and thus prevent accidents, are being developed. Another important goal is to develop special solutions for effective protection of pedestrians and cyclists. The specification of these systems and their implementation as prototypes will be based on detailed causal analysis of the sequence of events taking place before and during an accident.
The focus will be on four safety functions:
- Lateral control assistance;
- Intersection assistance;
- Protection of pedestrians and cyclists; and
- Predictive control of vehicle dynamics.
The anticipatory Active Safety project will design and develop solution approaches based on detailed cause analysis of the sequence of events before and during an accident. For the most promising approaches the information and sensor requirements will be described and appropriate driver-system interfaces will be investigated. The solutions once identified will be implemented within the course of the project in driving simulators and in test vehicles equipped with prototypes. The assistance functions of Anticipatory Active Safety will be evaluated with respect to feasibility and prospective safety benefits. To this end, the demonstrators are used to carry out extensive tests in driving simulators, on test tracks, and in real traffic. Based on this milestone, system functionality will be extended and implemented in prototypes demonstrating the full range of system functions in test vehicles.