Autonomous Emergency Braking systems with pedestrian detection (AEB Pedestrian) equip a growing proportion of new vehicles, but are still scarce on the automotive market, so their impact on road safety can still mostly be assessed by prospective studies. In the present study, a complete set of injury risk curves, built from representative AEB-Pedestrian relevant French accident data, were used, allowing AEB effectiveness assessment in terms of lives saved and mitigated injuries. These injury risk curves were used in combination with re-simulated impact speed distributions that were derived from a car kinematic model to which AEB sensors with realistic detection and actuator actions strategies were fitted. Metrics synthesising AEB effectiveness were built and used in a Taguchi-matrices based Design of Experiments setup, which allowed to highlight critical AEB design parameters, by means of a variance analysis.

This sensitivity analysis – performed over three different AEB setups - showed the influence of the decision algorithm and braking design parameters over the influence of detection parameters. Results nevertheless show encouraging effectiveness values on all levels of injury, depending on the field of view parameters alone, once reference values of the decision algorithm and braking design parameters have been set.