Audi presents future active safety technologies

June 23, 2010 // Christoph Hammerschmidt

At the opportunity of the final conference of the AKTIV research initiative, Audi subsidiaries Projekthaus Fahrerassistenzsysteme and Audi Electronics Ventures (AEV) have presented three projects highlighting the technology for future safety assistants.

The AKTIV project focused on systems that actively intervene in driving in the case of critical situations.

The first project introduced by the two Audi subsidiaries focuses on the interaction between motorists on one side and cyclists and pedestrians on the other. The researchers identified typical accident scenarios, classified the gravity of injuries along with such accidents and derived measures for a related action concept.

The concepts involved what the Audi engineers call a “seeing” vehicle, equipped with 3D imaging sensors and the related data processing equipment. A processing unit for these 3D image data analyses the traffic situation and in the case of an imminent accident it initiates an action concept for brakes and steering. These automatic actions help to alleviate accident-prone situations.

In the projects “Active emergency braking”, and “Driving safety and attentiveness” Audi works on next-generation active safety systems. Besides the collision object, further relevant objects such as other traffic participants and crash barriers in the environment of the vehicle are identified. This ability goes beyond today's active emergency brake systems. The advantage, according to Audi: With these additional data available, the system can act and react faster; the automatic emergency brake is activated at an earlier point in time during an accident.

This includes information on the driver: If the system realizes that he/she is distracted, the system activates the brakes sooner since it anticipates that he won't be react in an adequate manner.

For this project, AEV engineers detected the drivers attentiveness by means of a video camera installed in the vehicle. The camera measures the driver's head position and head orientation and from these data it derives a statement with regard to the degree of the driver’s attentiveness. This statement is fed into the emergency brake assistant system.

Audi said the results of these projects are fed into the development of future safety systems for serial production. 

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