Abstract

In 2019, single vehicle road departure crashes accounted for 34% of all crash fatalities. These crashes typically consist of an unaware driver unintentionally leaving their lane of travel, departing the roadway, and colliding with a roadside fixed object such as a tree or guardrail. In an effort to try and prevent these kinds of crashes, active safety systems such as Lane Keep Assist (LKA) can apply automatic steering to return the vehicle back to the initial lane of travel before the crash can happen. Previous work has shown that a simulated LKA system could yield significant crash reduction benefits, but also shows that there potentially could be some residual crashes that are not prevented. The goal of this study was then to characterize these residual crashes that were identified from a simulated LKA system during previous work. The objective was to perform an in-depth analysis of the residual crashes to better understand root causes behind the occurrence of these crashes. The residual crashes that were identified from a simulated LKA system were determined to group into one of four main categories: (1) cases in which the system never activated due to a simulation specific speed threshold (2) cases in which the object was located very close to the point of departure/roadway (3) cases in which the vehicle departs the roadway at a relatively large angle and (4) cases in which the vehicle successfully avoided the object, but was unable to return to the road. Analysis of the residual crashes such as these gives useful insights on the current limitations of these active safety systems and gives direction towards possible solutions for the prevention of these crashes.

 

Galloway A, Sherony R, Hasegawa T, Riexinger LE, “Categorizing Road Departure Residual Crashes for a Simulated Lane-Keep-Assist (LKA) System”, 66th Annual Proceedings of the Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine, Student Symposium, Portland, Oregon. (October 2022).