In recent years, a number of European Commission funded projects have investigated how the objective of increasing pedestrians' safety can be attained by means of intelligent driver assistance systems. The results already available show that, while in the long range case, a warning system, to alert the driver as soon as a vulnerable road user (VRU) is detected and classified by the sensors, can be sufficient to reduce the number of accidents, an active intervention system is mandatory in pre-crash situations. The generation of collision avoidance manoeuvres appears to be a suitable application for switching control. In this paper, in particular, an automatic pre-crash collision avoidance strategy for cars based on sliding mode control is presented. It produces a collision avoidance manoeuvre, if feasible, or, otherwise, an emergency braking to reduce the energy at the impact. Experimental results based on a scaled radio-controlled car are provided (Author/publisher)
Abstract