Abstract
Abstract. The protection of vulnerable road users (VRU) is a key issue of future driver assistance systems. An important point is to determine whether a VRU is visually hidden to the driver. This additional information is essential for the driver to prevent an accident or to reduce its severity. We show that by using a transponder attached at the VRU, wavelength dependent diffraction effects can be utilized to distinguish between visible and hidden VRUs. Several diffraction measurements were carried out taking place in open space areas with simple big scattering objects and in different road traffic scenarios demonstrating a reliability of nearly 100%. If future driver assistance systems for detecting VRUs are complemented with automotive electronics which enable distinction between visible and hidden VRUs, accidents can be avoided.
Highlights
The protection of vulnerable road users (VRU) is a key issue of future driver assistance systems (Rasshofer, 2007)
Our objective was to determine whether this diffraction effect is measurable in real road traffic scenarios, how reliable a detection of hidden VRU is, and how the parameters mentioned above influence the measurement results
After measurement point (MP) 200, the target person gets invisible for the receiver, and there are only waves present at RX which are double diffracted at the edges of the scattering object
Summary
The protection of vulnerable road users (VRU) is a key issue of future driver assistance systems (Rasshofer, 2007). In contrast to passive sensing, the beacon signal can be detected if the person wearing the transponder is visually hidden, for instance by a parked car or a roadside tree. Our method to identify visually hidden persons is based on dual-frequency discrimination. A transponder (according to the terms of radar technology we call it “active target”) attached at the VRU emits two signals with different frequencies which are detected by the receiver in the car. If the VRU is invisible for the driver, the signals are diffracted around the scattering object and get an additional attenuation. Our objective was to determine whether this diffraction effect is measurable in real road traffic scenarios, how reliable a detection of hidden VRU is, and how the parameters mentioned above influence the measurement results
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