This report presents preliminary guidelines to develop an effective lane change Collision Avoidance System (CAS). These guidelines were developed, to a large part, based on the experiences from a small number of naive drivers tested on public roads with a testbed vehicle. A functional lane change CAS was implemented on the testbed utilising today's technology. This was done to demonstrate utility and to perform realistic testing. However, the implementation described in this report is not the only acceptable one and it is certainly not the least expensive. Nevertheless, it demonstrates that an effective lane change CAS can be built today. In order to avoid lane change collisions, the lane change CAS must monitor the areas on either side of the vehicle to determine the presence of another vehicle that could interfere with a planned lane change. It must also determine if a vehicle is approaching those areas with enough relative speed to potentially be in conflict with the instrumented vehicle. Those two tasks must be accomplished in any and all driving environments. The effectiveness of the lane change CAS was estimated using drivers' errors as a surrogate for collisions. This method led to an estimate of 43% effectiveness, which is consistent with previous estimates found in the literature. Although the cost saving per vehicle is estimated to be relatively small for a lane change CAS, eliminating lane change crashes is still deemed to be a worthwhile endeavour, one that focus groups say they want and will pay for.
Samenvatting