A collision mitigation system using laser scanner and stereovision fusion and its assessment

Road traffic incidents analysis has shown that 52% of them are caused by a collision between two vehicles or between a vehicle and an obstacle. In this paper, a collision mitigation system is proposed and evaluated towards various typical road situations. The aim of the system is to decrease the kinetic energy of the collision through automatic emergency braking that occurs 1 second before the collision. This emergency braking is triggered by an alarm coming from a decision unit taking into consideration the results of a generic obstacles detection system -based on fusion between stereovision and laser scanner- and a warning area in front of the vehicle. The different sub-systems are presented. Various typical dangerous road situations are then introduced. The behavior of the collision mitigation system towards these situations is presented through real tests carried out in the context of the ARCOS French project. These experiments show the reliability, the genericity and the efficiency of the system. In particular, the false alarm rate is low, the detection rate is high and the system proves to be reactive.