Autonomous emergency braking system with potential field risk assessment for frontal collision mitigation

The progression of vehicle active safety research and its implementation have brought a lot of reduction in the number of road fatalities globally. It enables the vehicle to aid the driver in the risky scenarios. One of the examples is Autonomous Emergency Braking System (AEB). It yields the required braking torques intervention in the hazardous events to mitigate collision risks. However, statistics show that a large number of road accidents remain, including the case of near-miss incidents. In this work, to aid the reduction of the near-miss accident, and assist the AEB to maintain the safe-distance with the frontal obstacle, AEB is integrated with the Potential Field (PF) risk assessment strategy. When the PF threshold of the frontal obstacle's risk is violated, AEB provides the active braking intervention. The proposed design was tested and validated using a test vehicle, where it mitigates the collision risk with a static obstacle in a medium-speed scenario. The work is part of the continuous effort to develop the autonomous vehicle and reduce the high number of road accidents in Malaysia. Results show the integration of AEB and PF successfully aid the vehicle to mitigate the collision as well as maintaining the safe distance with the frontal obstacle.