Bosch makes urban traffic safer for pedestrians

Traffic in cities is often congested and unpredictable. Cars share the streets with bicycles, motorcycles, trucks, and buses. In a country like India, the traffic is even worse. Cars even share the streets with jaywalkers, cows, stray dogs, three-wheelers, juggads and what not.

It is not unusual to see cars double parked and pedestrians stepping out into the road without warning. The prospect of vehicles negotiating these hazards completely autonomously is almost unimaginable. “Autonomous driving is coming to cities, too. The level of automation is being gradually increased, starting out with driver assistance systems,” says Dr. Dietrich Manstetten, who works in research and advance engineering at Robert Bosch GmbH. Together with his colleague Dr. Lutz Bürkle and a team of 11 Bosch researchers, he is working on the technology needed to achieve this as part of the UR:BAN research initiative. The researchers have made great progress: “One of the things we’ve taught the cars is to predict what is going to happen next, and help drivers take evasive action whenever there is a threat of collision with a pedestrian,” Bürkle says.

UR:BAN (acronym from the German for urban space: user-friendly assistance systems and network management) is a publicly funded joint project. It brings together 31 partners from the automotive, automotive-supply, electronics, communications, and software industries, as well as universities, research institutes, and cities.

Evasive steering support prevents up to 58pc of collisions with pedestrians

A prerequisite for automated driving functions is to have sensors that reliably monitor the vehicle’s surroundings. “Only when we know what’s going on around the car can we determine the correct driving strategy,” Bürkle says. One component Bosch relies on for environment recognition is its stereo video camera, which can already be found in production vehicles. Mounted behind the windshield near the rear-view mirror, the camera monitors the area to the front of the test vehicle, and relays this information to a computer in the trunk. This computer analyzes the data more than ten times a second. But Bosch does not stop there. “Using smart algorithms, we get the computer to calculate how the environment is changing and where objects are headed,” Bürkle says. In other words, the Bosch technology not only detects the current position of pedestrians and cyclists, but also predicts where they will be in a second’s time. This presents new opportunities for pedestrian protection.

Based on this, the Bosch researchers have developed an assistance system that intervenes to prevent a collision with a pedestrian. At vehicle speeds up to 50 kmph, the system helps drivers brake and take evasive action. If braking alone is no longer enough to prevent a collision with a pedestrian who suddenly walks out in front of the car, the assistant instantaneously computes an evasive manoeuvre. As soon as drivers start using the steering wheel to take evasive action, the system kicks in to support the steering manoeuvre.

“According to our studies, provided the driver reacts at least half a second before a potential collision, the assistance system can help avoid it in 58 pc of cases,” Bürkle says. But it is even better to avoid situations such as this in the first place. Critical situations arise when drivers are distracted and not looking at the road. Bosch’s solution to this is called driver observation. “By monitoring drivers’ line of sight, tiny cameras in the vehicle’s interior can tell whether their eyes are on the road,” Manstetten says. This makes it possible to warn distracted drivers in good time before the traffic situation becomes risky. In this context, Bosch believes that it helps to place indicators in the instrument clusters or an LED display on the dashboard directly in the driver’s field of vision.