Abstract
Vehicle stability is a major active safety requirement with great potential for reducing road accidents. Active safety systems, such as Electronic Stability Control (ESC), have been clearly demonstrated to improve safety by stabilizing the vehicle in critical manoeuvres. Consequently, ESC is becoming mandatory in different countries worldwide and related regulations have progressively been coming into force in the US, Canada and Europe during the period from year 2008 until 2012.
Current ESC regulation tests are based on one single manoeuvre known as Dwell sine. The manoeuvre reproduces severe obstacle avoidance where ESC efficiency is checked in terms of yaw stability and lateral response. However, passing the Dwell sine test does not guarantee good and safe performance for other critical situations. Therefore, additional test procedures should be defined in order to test vehicle stability in a wider range of accident scenarios.
This paper describes a set of test procedures which cover with only a few specific manoeuvres the widest possible range of critical situations. Being more than a simple pass/fail result, these test procedures will be able to quantify and therefore compare the safety performance of involved active safety systems and complete vehicle stability. These results could be used by the suitable organisations to define a rating system to thereby increase public awareness of the active safety performance of vehicles on the market.
During the development of the test procedures, state-of-the-art test instrumentation is considered in order to maximise test objectiveness and repeatability. Furthermore, special emphasis is given to normalise test results with the aim of avoiding track/grip dependency and adapting the assessment to the different vehicle types.
This paper summarizes the latest developments corresponding to the stability assistance domain of the European project eVALUE (Testing and Evaluation Methods of ICT-based Safety Systems, FP7 – ICT 1st call, grant agreement no. 215607). Its main focus is to define objective methods for the assessment of active safety performance. A second paper (F2010- D-027) will be presented via poster session covering details of the longitudinal and lateral assistance domains with their special requirements.
Keywords: Assessment, Active safety, Stability, Objective test, eVALUE project