Active Pedestrian Safety 2.0

Active Pedestrian Safety 2.0

Place: Large lecture room.

Affiliation: Daimler Group. Germany.  

Daimler introduced an advanced set of driver assistance functions in its latest Mercedes-Benz 2013-2014 S-, E-, and C-Class models, termed “Intelligent Drive”, using stereo vision. It includes a pedestrian safety component which facilitates fully automatic emergency braking. Meanwhile our research focused on developing the next-generation active pedestrian safety systems. These systems extract higher-level visual cues and use more sophisticated motion models for path prediction – enabling a deeper traffic situation understanding. They have the potential to react earlier in dangerous traffic situations, without increasing the false alarms. This is done by taking into account the pedestrian situational awareness (has the pedestrian seen the upcoming vehicle?) and traffic scene context (location of pedestrian w.r.t. the curbside, criticality of situation). First prototypes implemented in our demonstrator vehicle showed, that we are able to brake up to 1 s earlier in dangerous situations with lateral crossing pedestrians.