Volvo was very excited when they finally developed one of those cool auto brake systems at home. The idea is that the onboard radars and cameras detect the obstacles ahead, warn the driver, and he didn’t take action, will apply the brakes automatically. Fine, but somehow this system is not working for Volvo! A few months ago they decided to show it off to the press, but as we reported the car actually crashed into the obstacle it was supposed to avoid. They took it back to the lab, made a few changes, brought it back again, and… Yep, you guessed it. It failed again!
Video: Volvo Auto Brake System Fails, Again!
Hey, the test was successful. It did not detect a person.
We, rather than putting real people in front of our cars,…well let me back up. The system is waiting for driver to do something: apply braking or move the steering wheel, something that indicates he/she is alive and taking corrective action. In all the media testing done in Spain, Portugal, and last two weeks in US, we believe in total over 5,000 individual media tests against a dummy, the ‘failure to recognize’ the test dummy and driver inputs caused the vehicles to hit the dummy in very very few test runs.
Recently, in Spain, prior to the very last wave of media to do this test, the dummy was blown over by wind, a reflective surface marker was blown off and not replaced, our fault. We needed the marker to trick Pedestrian Detection that what it was seeing was “human” and not something else. It chose ‘something else’ and did not auto brake – as it should.
The system is always scanning for an object. When something is found, it’s matched against an on-board database of about 10,000 real world human pictures. It is very good at it’s task. When an object is deemed ‘human’, it tacks it to determine intended path and if it will cross in front of S60, if it looks like impact is imminent and the driver is not paying attention, the system applies the brakes. When it try’s to match against a dummy, by tricking it with reflective surfaces, it takes a positive action to pre-charge the brake system and wait for driver input. Failing input, it brakes. In this case, the dummy was not recognized as a dummy and the system did not, as intended, operate.
We did not approve of this test: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWnWaG6juH0
Dan
Volvo
djohn116@volvocars.com