Mannequin development for pedestrian pre-Collision System evaluation

Pedestrian PCS (pre-Collision System), as a novel active pedestrian safety equipment to reduce pedestrian fatalities, was introduced by several vehicle manufactures in recent years. How to evaluate this system is still in study. This paper describes the development of a set of mannequins for pedestrian PCS evaluation. These mannequins represent relevant physical properties of human beings that are used by most common PCS sensors in vehicles for pedestrian detection. Three different mannequin sizes were generated to represent child, fit adult and obese adult of U.S. pedestrians. These sizes were generated using a K-means clustering method with crash weighted NHANES (National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey) data. To ensure that the mannequin provides the same radar cross section (RCS) as a pedestrian in the view of a 77GHz automotive radar, a special mannequin skin was developed. To make the mannequin move like a real human in the view of PCS cameras, mannequins were configured with 6 degrees of freedom articulation, 2 for shoulders, 2 for hips, and 2 for knees. The mannequin limbs are detachable at crash in order to protect the mannequin motion driving system. To ensure that the mannequins move like a real human, a gait planning method was adopted to generate different walking speed based on the gaiting research in medical fields. Other mannequin features are to support various test setups, low weight for test vehicle safety, and crash forgivingness. The mannequins were used in hundreds of PCS test runs at different crash angles and vehicle speeds.