Abstract
Keywords:AKTIV, safety for pedestrians and bicyclists, vulnerable road users, integrated lateral and longitudinal driver assistance, integrated Human Machine Interface
This paper provides an overview of current activities in automotive research and developments in terms of active vehicle safety and driver assistance systems. The tradition of vehicle safety is mainly based on passive safety measures. Examples in this area are safety belts, airbags and design measures to help assure the integrity of occupant cell in case of a collision. A further important focus in this field is pedestrian safety. In current cars these effective passive safety systems are supplemented by active systems. Well-known active systems are ABS, ESP, DSR, Front Scan, etc. Parallel to the development of these active systems, driver assistance systems were introduced in over the past approximately 10 years. Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC), Side Assist, or Lane Assist are examples of these comfort systems. From the technical point of view, active safety and driver assistance systems share challenges with respect to environment and vehicle environment sensors as well as on vehicle dynamic actuators. The resulting reuse potential is very important in addition to technical questions pertaining to such systems. It enables cost effectiveness or in other words it enables the improvement of user benefits at acceptable cost. Thus, the intelligent combination of both faculties, vehicular safety experiences and driver assistance systems, will be a key for the enhancement of future user benefit in passenger cars.
This paper will introduce two research activities of Volkswagen AG and Audi AG which are associated with the research initiative AKTIV ("adaptive, cooperative technologies for intelligent traffic). The AKTIV initiative will be described in detail in the next section. One research activity of AKTIV is SFR (Safety for Pedestrians and Bicyclists). It deals with active safety issues. The second research activity is called IQF (Integrated Lateral Assistance). In this activity Volkswagen AG will enhance known ideas of lateral and longitudinal driver assistance to one integrated driver assistance feature with a high level of availability. Both systems SFR and IQF take advantage of the same set of vehicle dynamic actuators (e.g. the steering actuator EPS) and similar sensor set-ups as explained in the following sections.