Technical Sessions

F2008-08-061

Current Trends in Vehicle Active Safety and Driver Assistance Development

Dr. Tobias Giebel, Volkswagen AG, Germany
Dr. Marc-Michael Meinecke, Volkswagen AG, Germany
Dr. Ulrich Widmann, Audi AG, Germany
Dr. Mark Gonter, Volkswagen AG, Germany

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 belts 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 safety systems. Well-known active systems are airbags, ABS, ESP, DSR, Front Scan, etc. Parallel to the development of active safety systems, driver assistance systems were introduced in over the past approximately 10 years. Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) or Side Scan 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 dynamic 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 paper. 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). It 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 paper.

This abstract is supplemented by a PDF, which can be viewed here.

Session: Driver Assistance III