Determine characteristics requirement for the surrogate road edge objects for road departure mitigation testing

Abstract

Road departure mitigation system (RDMS), a vehicle active safety feature, uses road edge objects to determine potential road departure. In the U.S., 45%, 16%, and 15% of car-mile (traffic flow * miles) roads have grass, metal guardrail, and concrete divider as road edge, respectively. It is difficult to test RDMS with real roadside objects. Lightweight and crashable surrogate roadside objects that have representative radar, LIDAR and camera characteristics of real objects have been developed for testing. This paper describes the identification of automotive radar, LIDAR, and visual characteristics of metal guardrail, concrete divider, and grass. These characteristics will be referenced for designing and fabricating the representative surrogate objects for RDMS testing. Colors and types of the roadside objects were identified from 24,735 randomly sampled locations in the US using Google street view images. The radar and LIDAR parameters were measured using 24GHz/77GHz radar and 350-2500nm IR spectrometer.