Steering and Evasion Assist

Steering and evasion assistance defines a new and future class of driver assistance systems to avoid an impending collision with other traffic participants. Dynamic and kinematic considerations reveal that an evasive steering maneuver has high potential for collision avoidance in many driving situations. Three different system layouts are described: driver-initiated evasion, corrective evasion, and automatic evasion assistance. Since an automatic steering intervention is a challenging and responsible task, the technological requirements for situation analysis and environment perception are stated. Many technical solutions for a steering intervention are conceivable; therefore several actuator concepts are discussed and assessed with respect to human machine interface (HMI) impacts. A short survey of research activities of industry and academia is given. As an example for a research level prototype, the Daimler automatic evasion assistance system for pedestrian protection is presented in detail. Based on binocular stereo vision, crossing pedestrians are detected by fusion of a pedestrian classification module with a 6D-Vision moving object detection module. Time-To-X criticality measures are used for situation analysis and prediction as well as for maneuver decision. Tested on a proving ground, the prototype system is able to decide within a fraction of a second whether to perform automatic braking or evasive steering, at vehicle speeds of urban traffic environment. By this it is shown that automatic steering and evasion assistance comes to reality and will be introduced stepwise to the market.