SAFE-UP project drives key research for Euro NCAP’s future vehicle safety assessment

12/09/2022 / Leave a Comment / News / By

The SAFE-UP Project is proactively designing and analysing safety-critical scenarios in a highly automated and mixed traffic environment, by integrating traffic accident data and future traffic conditions with new forms of safety metrics and sub-microscopic models in a traffic simulation platform. Ahead of the release of the Euro NCAP 2030 roadmap, Technical Manager for ADAS (Advanced driving assistance systems) and automated driving at Euro NCAP, Adriano Palao Bernal, shared his thoughts on the programme’s vision for future vehicle safety in Europe and how the SAFE-UP project’s innovations support their work.

In which way do SAFE-UP’s outcomes relate to the 2030 Euro NCAP roadmap?

SAFE-UP’s project deliverables are promising. To achieve the goal of shifting towards scenario-based assessment and tackling advanced driving assistance systemss robustness in real-life situations, it is essential for Euro NCAP to rely on solid facts and data, ensuring we understand aspects such as:

  • Accidentology: addressing relevant scenarios based on magnitude (number of killed or severely injured) and selecting the appropriate parameters after understanding the most common accident types (e.g., delta speed, overlap/impact point, occlusions).
  • Testability: implications of introducing additional variables in a scenario, and the feasibility of harmonising the procedure across labs.
  • Awarding real performance: fact-based understanding of which variations are a challenge to ADAS perception in the real-world – eventually closing the gap between true positive ratio in current track scenarios (which is high on average) and real-world scenarios (low on average). This will help to differentiate the truly robust systems from the ones that are not so robust.
  • Assessment: as they move towards a scenario grid which is exponentially growing in size, it is necessary to look at alternative verification methods, such as spot testing and virtual validation. For the latter, we need to understand to what extent we can trust the results.

Read the full interview on the SAFE-UP website here.