Automatic emergency braking (AEB) is now the most important advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS) product—at least in the U.S. On May 31, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced it is adding both AEB and pedestrian AEB (PAEB) to its two main programs for increasing vehicle safety: the New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) and a Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) regulation. The government agency is doing so due to AEB’s potential to prevent many fatalities and mitigate a large number of non-fatal injuries.
NCAP provides comparative information on the safety performance of new vehicles to assist consumers with vehicle-purchasing decisions and to encourage safety improvements.
This proposed regulation, according to EETimes is the most important and impactful ADAS rule that the NHTSA has ever made.
This ADAS tech deployment has an aggressive testing procedure that will provide the public with growing, lifesaving and injury-mitigating technologies. Hopefully, the NHTSA will succeed in getting early voluntary deployment from many auto OEMs.
AEB-PAEB is comprehensive and is much stronger than the current voluntary AEB, which is only for frontal crashes. A big change is that AEB testing specifies crash avoidance—not just mitigation. The mandate adds pedestrian AEB for daytime and nighttime crashes. AEB testing also increases test speeds that include the speed at which most frontal and pedestrian crashes occur. Test speed is up to 100 km/hour for frontal crashes and up to 65 km/hour for pedestrian crashes.
The NHTSA’s estimated benefits of the AEB-PAEB mandate are excellent. Yearly fatalities prevented is 362, with 66% coming from PAEB. Yearly non-fatal injuries mitigated are projected at over 24,300, with frontal AEB accounting for 89%. The NHTSA believes these estimates are conservative.
The mandate is good news for ADAS sensor suppliers. The AEB mandate will increase the number of sensors and/or sensor capabilities. Better cameras will be needed for nighttime operation, with infrared cameras becoming a big opportunity. Radars may go to 4D imaging sensors. LiDAR will likely be more common with the AEB mandate.
Read the full EETimes article here: including a concise summary of the mandate. Download our white paper to explain further how Owl AI is meeting regulatory mandates.
Owl Autonomous Imaging is working to deliver wide-scale availability of the technology to enable vehicles to avoid pedestrian collisions at night, and all conditions, to meet this mandate.
