Performance Evaluation of Pedestrian Active Safety System based on Pedestrian-to-Vehicle Communication

Pedestrian safety is an important problem worldwide. Almost 30 000 people were killed (36% were pedestrians) and more than 270 000 were injured (29% were pedestrians) in traffic accidents in Russian Federation (RF) in 2008. In European Union (EU) situatio n looks better, but additional measures to increase the safety of pedestrians as well as the road safety in general are obviously required. Up-to-date pedestrian protection systems rely on the infrastructure enhancements (improving roadway lightning, spee d limits control, etc.), passive safety systems (design of vehicle body, pedestrian airbags, etc.) and active safety systems (based on sensors and cameras as well as algorithms for the discrimination of pedestrians). All these approaches assume that pedes trians do not have any communication means to inform the driver about their presence. However, a conception of vehicular ad-hoc networks, where vehicles communicate with each other via IEEE 802.11-based wireless technology, which is often referred to as D edicated Short Range Communications (DSRC), allows to release this restriction. By means of DSRC vehicles in some geographic area perform information exchange with each other, roadside and central equipment as well as pedestrians' personal devices. In the later case novel active pedestrian protection systems can be introduced. The objective of this project is to study in detail the potentials of DSRC technology for the pedestrian active safety applications. The scope of studied questions will include effi cient beaconing and information dissemination algorithms with congestion control and power-saving strategies as well as efficient collision prediction and pedestrian behavior analysis in urban and sub-urban areas.