Soft Pedestrian 360 adds safety and realism to pedestrian target testing

Soft Pedestrian 360 has been developed to support tests for improved sensor perception and categorisation as well as decrease the time and cost of testing through improved robustness.

To enhance the realism of the target the Soft Pedestrian 360 features articulation of the knee, hip, shoulder and neck. Actively articulated knees, enabling the hip and knee to move independently of each other, control the gait and allow a more varied range of movement to be reproduced.

Joseph Kelly, chief engineer at DRI told The Engineer that the continued development of active safety systems drives the need for more accurate and complete representations of pedestrians.

“Ultimately, it is not possible to know which attributes or characteristics of a pedestrian will be used by ADAS development engineers to categorise a given sensed object as a pedestrian,” he said. “Therefore, the most accurate representations of pedestrians are needed to help these engineers develop robust active safety systems and to test their efficacy in real world scenarios.  The actively controlled gait articulation and the optional arm and head articulations are just a few of the attributes available on the DRI Soft Pedestrian 360 to increase realism.”

Kelly added that primary design objectives for the Soft Pedestrian 360 were to minimise the tendency to damage the articulation mechanisms during a crash, and minimise the number of exposed ‘hard points’ when the dummy comes apart after the collision, thereby minimising its tendency to cause damage to the vehicle under test.

“Damage to the vehicle under test caused by targets can be a substantial contributor to the total cost of testing ADAS technologies,” said Kelly. “It isn’t just the damage to the test vehicle but also lost track and engineering time waiting for repairs that substantially increase the cost of testing.”

The key to reducing the potential for damage to the test vehicle are the target’s compliance, the minimisation of said external hardpoints and the modularity of the design, which reduces the mass of any individual component that could contact the test vehicle and cause damage. The limbs, head and mounting pole attach to the torso via foam blocks that engage corresponding sockets in the torso, so that when these components separate on impact, there are no exposed hard points.

The servos operating the limbs and the head of the pedestrian are encased in foam and sit within each component, so the vehicle under test is protected when the limbs disconnect on impact.

The target is also covered in a hard-wearing fabric clothing that prevents the foam core from being worn away or torn apart.

“Efficient use of track time is critical to keeping costs down and maximising the uptime of both the test vehicle and the test equipment is a critical part of this,” said Kelly. “Before we developed our own pedestrian target, we were regularly changing and repairing servos as a result of damage and this significantly impacted the test schedule. Our solution aims to make ADAS testing as efficient as possible.”