Large-Scale FOT for Analyzing the Impacts of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems

The euroFOT project is the first large-scale field operational test (FOT) of multiple advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) in Europe. It will evaluate the impacts of ADAS on safety, traffic efficiency, environment and user-acceptance in real life situations with normal drivers using instrumented vehicles. The results of the evaluation of this field test will offer valuable information for the short and long-term impact of ADAS. The approach derives from the FESTA handbook, which provides guidelines for conducting field operational tests. The FESTA handbook approach is being adapted and extended according to the specific requirements of the euroFOT project. Altogether about 1000 vehicles from different manufacturers and with different ADAS will take part in the FOT and are coordinated by five vehicle management centers (VMC). The project duration is 40 months and it will end in August 2011. At the German1-VMC the data acquisition and data processing from 240 FOT vehicles is managed by the Institut fur Kraftfahrzeuge of the RWTH Aachen University (ika). The tested functions cover Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC), Lane Departure Warning (LDW), Forward Collision Warning (FCW) and Curve Speed Warning (CSW). Thereby only data from the vehicles’ CAN-busses is used at the German1-VMC (e.g. vehicle speed, acceleration etc.).