Technical Paper
Hazard-Anticipative Driving Mechanism at Overtaking Pedestrians in Narrow Roads
2013-03-25
2013-01-0091
This study focuses on the scene that a vehicle overtakes a pedestrian in a narrow road in an urban area and proposes the safety index that shows the appropriate driving behavior in the target scene. Moreover, this study evaluates the validity of the index by experiments. In the target scenes, drivers need to drive carefully, preparing for the latent risk that the pedestrians may start crossing the roads suddenly. In other word, the vehicles must reduce the speed in order to be ready to avoid accidental contacts with pedestrians in case the pedestrians start crossing the road suddenly. However, according to the pedestrian model proposed by the authors in the previous study, the crossing angles of pedestrians are unpredictable. Therefore, the drivers must drive with such speed that the vehicle can avoid an accidental contact by braking even if the pedestrian start crossing the road at any angle.