A generalised approach to active pedestrian safety testing

Active pedestrian safety systems can help to significantly increase pedestrian road safety, but must be tested very carefully before used in series application. Since there is usually a very small amount of time to prevent the collision, the activation of an emergency brake is always a critical decision. On the other hand, of course, false triggerings must be prevented. Aiming to increase pedestrian and vehicle safety, this thesis presents a novel approach for the test of active pedestrian safety systems. From the question "What is needed to test and compare future active pedestrian safety systems?" are resulting the following questions: 1. What are the significant characteristics of real pedestrians? 2. How can this features be mapped to a test system? This thesis presents characteristic features of pedestrians from the perspective of automotive surround sensors and introduces a novel test system approach including a realistic pedestrian dummy which is able to replicate those characteristics. Furthermore it introduces a novel active pedestrian safety test methodology, based on the variation of target characteristics, environmental conditions and driver behaviour. The proposed pedestrian dummy was set up in real size and tested on the test track in vehicle tests. A video of the described test and the novel pedestrian dummy can be seen here: https://youtu.be/eF5IkqsknB