It is well known that most accidents with pedestrians are caused by the driver not being alert or misinterpreting the situation. For that reason advanced forward looking safety systems have a high potential to improve safety for this group of vulnerable road users. Active pedestrian protection systems combine reduction of impact speed by driver warning and/or autonomous braking with deployment of protective devices shortly before the imminent impact. According to the Euro NCAP roadmap the Autonomous Emergency Braking system tests for Pedestrians Protection will be set in force from 2016 onwards.

Various projects and organisations in Europe are developing performance tests and assessment procedures as accompanying measures to the Euro NCAP initiative. To provide synthesised input to Euro NCAP so-called Harmonisation Platforms (HP’s) have been established. Their main goal is to foster exchange of information on key subjects, thereby generating a clear overview of similarities and differences on the approaches chosen and, on that basis, recommend on future test procedures.

In this paper activities of the Harmonisation Platform 2 on the development of Test Equipment are presented. For the testing targets that mimic humans different sensing technologies are required. A first set of specifications for pedestrian targets and the propulsion systems as collected by Harmonisation Platform 2 are presented together with a first evaluation for a number of available tools.