Schram et al - 1 EURO NCAP’S FIRST STEP TO ASSESS AUTONOMOUS EMERGENCY BRAKING (AEB) FOR VULNERABLE ROAD USERS

Following the implementation of AEB City and AEB Inter-Urban systems in Euro NCAP’s safety rating in 2014, a third type of AEB technology, Autonomous Emergency Braking for Vulnerable Road Users (AEB VRU), will be added to the overall assessment of new vehicles in 2016. The introduction of AEB VRU will be done in two phases where in 2016 AEB Pedestrian is implemented followed by AEB Cyclists in 2018. AEB VRU will be awarded as part of the assessment of Pedestrian Protection and represents the next step to improve the protection of vulnerable road users, complimentary to the existing subsystem tests to the vehicle front end. Following system tests in common pedestrian accident scenarios, more challenging and demanding cyclist scenarios are planned in a subsequent phase. In close corporation with the car industry represented by the ACEA, JAMA and KAMA associations, Euro NCAP has developed detailed test and assessment procedures for AEB Pedestrian. The procedures are based on the existing car to car AEB test and assessment protocols and validated and checked for repeatability and reproducibility at several Euro NCAP laboratories. This paper describes both the test and assessment protocols. BACKGROUND In 2009, Euro NCAP introduced the overall rating scheme, which allows new technologies to be implemented in the safety assessment of a new vehicle. The new rating scheme consists of four areas of assessment, also called boxes, which together result in a single overall safety rating. The four areas of assessment are Adult Occupant Protection (AOP), Child Occupant Protection (COP), Pedestrian Protection (PP) and Safety Assist (SA). Over the last few years, Euro NCAP has rapidly raised the requirements for better protection of vulnerable road users in the event of a crash which was seen to lag behind. After significant updates to the test and assessment protocols in the area of passive safety, the next logical step was to include the assessment of AEB systems. Due to the nature of pedestrian accidents with passenger cars, most AEB systems are only capable of mitigating these crashes and therefore, Euro NCAP considers these systems complementary to passive safety measures already in place. At the moment different AEB Pedestrian systems are already available on the market, based on radar, (stereo) camera or a combination of these sensors. The performance of these systems vary significantly based on the sensors used. The first generation of camera based systems typically switch off during low ambient lighting conditions as classification of pedestrians in darkness is not reliable enough. Euro NCAP has based its requirements for AEB Pedestrian systems on best practice to push for further development of these lifesaving technologies.