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by Christopher A. Sawyer > Contributing Editor Are autonomous vehicles the Holy Grail of automotive safety? Both the media and Wall Street have focused on the autonomous future, suggesting driverless cars are not only just around the corner, but will dramatically reduce, if not eliminate, vehicle crashes and force wide-spread global adoption of this technology. They claim injury and death rates will plummet, as will insurance costs, and automakers will be able to make their vehicles less "battle hardened" for the simple reason that they are unlikely to crash during their lifetime. Further, you will be able to choose between autonomous and non-autonomous driving on the fy, and turn the family car from a transportation device to a rolling ofce or conversation pit. "At times I think some of the media coverage has gotten well ahead of reality," says Brian Loh, TRW's vice president, Active Safety and Automated Driving. "We are way far away from where you could start taking passive safety out of a vehicle." As with any safety system, autono- mous driving is built from building blocks laid down over decades, but the advent of greater computing power, more robust software, and the introduction of intermediary technologies have created safety modules with greater bandwidth. These are morphing into Advanced SAFETY & AUTONOMY Autonomous vehicles are either right around the corner or years away, but the efect they have on vehicle safety depends a lot on getting everything right. p Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) will be the frst automated system ofered by automakers. In the near future, all new cars will require AEB in order to get a Five Star safety rating, and will build upon this system. Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) that move from providing warnings to the driver (Level 0), to automating specifc functions (Level 1), to the combined automation of at least two primary control functions (Level 2), limited self-driving (Level 3) and full self- driving (Level 4). "The most common sensors will be the ones needed to get a Five Star safety rating." says Loh. "You will have a camera, a radar or both, to which you can add software that brings some level of automated functionality." Emergency braking assist will be one of the frst steps on this ladder. Moving beyond this level of functionality, however, will require systems that are much more ambitious and robust. "Let's say you're in a situation where it's too late to brake," says Loh, "and you need to make an evasive maneuver." In this situation, the safety system would introduce torque to create a "torque tunnel" that applies the right amount of steering input to steer around the obstacle. This requires pre-programming those values into the onboard computer, reading the available grip at the wheels, and applying enough input to steer around the object without spinning. "That's a lot more complicated than automatic emergency braking," says Loh. "You need free-space detection, must understand where you are in the two- dimensional grid, and have to take into AD&P; > June 2015 > FEATURE > Safety & Autonomy > Christopher A. Sawyer 24