Performance Assessment in a “Lane Departure” Scenario of Impending Collision for an ADAS Logic Based on Injury Risk Minimisation

The current prioritisation of road safety enhancement in the automotive sector is leading toward the near future implementation of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADASs), aiming at the simultaneous intervention of braking and steering for impact avoidance in case of an impending collision. However, it is partially unclear how new technologies for controlling the steering will actually behave in the case of inevitable collision states; the need consequently emerges to propose and tune efficient ADAS strategies to handle the complexity of critical road scenarios. An adaptive intervention logic on braking and steering for highly automated vehicles is applied in the context of a “lane departure”, two-vehicle critical road scenario; the ADAS implementing the logic activates to minimise the injury risk for the ego vehicle’s occupants at each time step, adapting to the eventual scenario evolution consequent to actions by other road users. The performance of the adaptive logic is investigated by a software-in-the-loop approach, varying the mutual position of the involved vehicles at the beginning of the criticality and comparing the injury risk outcomes of the eventual impacts with those connected to the Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB). The results highlight a twofold benefit from the adaptive logic application in terms of road safety: (1) it decreases the frequency of impacts compared to the AEB function; (2) in inevitable collision states, it decreases injury risk for the vehicles’ occupants down to 40% compared to the AEB. This latter condition is achieved thanks to the possibility of reaching highly eccentric impact conditions (low impact forces and occupants’ injury risk as a consequence). The obtained highlights expand the literature regarding the adaptive logic by considering a diverse critical road scenario and investigating how fine variations on the vehicles’ mutual position at the beginning of the criticality reflect on the injury outcomes for different types of intervention logic.