Evaluation of Forward Collision Avoidance System using Driver's Hazard Perception

Evaluating the performance of Forward Collision Avoidance Technologies (FCATs) is essential in the early stage of the system testing. Drivers are the key interaction parts between the FCATs and vehicles, which play an important role in the performance evaluation. This paper proposes a practical method to evaluate the performance of FCATs by using a novel driver hazard perception measure, namely driver's risk response time. This measure describes the driver's awareness of potential collision risk, which is defined based on the Time-to-collision (TTC) and driver's brake response in a near-crash scenario. A two-month naturalistic driving experiment has been conducted using a vehicle equipped with one FCAT, i.e., Collision Mitigation Brake System (CMBS). An interval-based cumulative frequency data pretreatment method is used to extract near-crashes. Then, the hazard perception measure is computed in near-crashes with CMBS on and off, which can show the effectiveness of CMBS. The results demonstrate that CMBS is highly-positive in improving driver's hazard perception, especially in speed range between 45 km/h and 60 km/h. This fact is consistent with the expected effect of CMBS, which shows the proposed measure for hazard perception is capable of describing drivers' awareness of collision risk. In addition, this measure is applicable to assess the performance of FCATs during the function designing stage.