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As part of active safety systems for reducing bicyclist fatalities and injuries, Bicyclist Pre-Collision System (BPCS), also known as Bicyclist Autonomous Emergency Braking System, is being studied currently by several vehicles manufactures. This paper describes the development of a surrogate bicyclist which includes a surrogate bicycle and a surrogate bicycle rider to support the development and evaluation of BPCS. The surrogate bicycle is designed to represent the visual and radar characteristics of real bicyclists in the United States. The size of bicycle surrogate mimics the 26 inch adult bicycle, which is the most popular adult bicycle sold in the US. The radar cross section (RCS) of the surrogate bicycle is designed based on RCS measurement of the real adult sized bicycles.

Pedestrian Automatic Emergency Braking (PAEB) for helping avoiding/mitigating pedestrian crashes has been equipped on some passenger vehicles. Since approximately 70% pedestrian crashes occur in dark conditions, one of the important components in the PAEB evaluation is the development of standard testing at night. The test facility should include representative low-illuminance environment to enable the examination of the sensing and control functions of different PAEB systems. The goal of this research is to characterize and model light source distributions and variations in the low-illuminance environment and determine possible ways to reconstruct such an environment for PAEB evaluation. This paper describes a general method to collect light sources and illuminance information by processing large amount of potential collision locations at night from naturalistic driving video data.

According to the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 743 pedal cyclists were killed and 48,000 were injured in motor vehicle crashes in 2013. As a novel active safety equipment to mitigate bicyclist crashes, bicyclist Pre-Collision Systems (PCSs) are being developed by many vehicle manufacturers. Therefore, developing equipment for evaluating bicyclist PCS is essential. This paper describes the development of a bicycle carrier for carrying the surrogate bicyclist in bicyclist PCS testing. An analysis on the United States national crash databases and videos from TASI 110 car naturalistic driving database was conducted to determine a set of most common crash scenarios, the motion speed and profile of bicycles. The bicycle carrier was designed to carry or pull the surrogate bicyclist for bicycle PCS evaluation. The carrier is a platform with a 4 wheel differential driving system.