CHAMELEON - Pre-crash application all around the vehicle
Overview
Background & policy context:
Improving road safety is a policy imperative, given the scale of deaths and injuries caused every year. Significant progress has been obtained in recent years by introducing passive safety systems on vehicles, which can reduce the consequences of an accident once it occurs.
This positive trend can be further improved by equipping the vehicle with a pre-crash system, able to predict the risk of an accident in advance.
Objectives:
Main objective of the Chameleon project has been to develop and evaluate a pre-crash system for vehicles, able to detect an imminent impact with high reliability.
Aim of a pre-crash function is to increase the protection of all the occupants, optimising the effectiveness of restraint systems by an adaptable or anticipated action, or even conceiving new types of passive safety devices.
The focus of the project is on applications for passenger cars. The sensor technologies investigated are especially the microwave radar, laser and computer vision. All the different scenarios of road and traffic are taken into account.
Starting from the existing knowledge on Advanced Driver Assistance Functions (ADAS), the Chameleon objective involves therefore the following main aspects:
- To define a system concept for this new function, exploring how to link preventive and passive safeties in order to obtain an added safety value;
- To investigate the sensor requirements, identify the most useful technologies, develop and test suitable sensor solutions;
- To define what type of information should be delivered to the passive safety systems and especially the correct timing before the crash;
- To evaluate effectiveness and safety benefits of a pre-crash system, analysing new solutions for restraint systems.
Methodology:
To reach these results, a first important point is to improve the performance of sensors now available for ADAS, particularly in term of range, data rate, and capability to track close objects. This is related to the shorter times and distances involved in the pre-crash application domain.
A further key issue is to develop crash prediction algorithms, which are able to estimate when a risky situation is about to turn into an unavoidable crash, with suitable advance time but maintaining an acceptable reliability.
The final pre-crash evaluation in Chameleon involves a demonstrator vehicle and several ad-hoc test procedures defined in the project itself. Besides a technical analysis, the evaluation framework includes an impact analysis and a study on safety, legal issues and standards.
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