ACAT

The Advanced Collision Avoidance Technologies (ACAT), backing project, funded by General Motors and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimated the potential safety benefits that may emerge from the deployment of backing crash warning systems. These countermeasures will alert the driver when there are obstacles present in the vehicle's travel path as it completes a backing maneuver.

Project tasks included:

• -Detailed examination of the magnitude and characterization of the backing crash problem, including inputs from non-traditional crash databases
• Development of crash scenarios that are representative of the diverse conditions under which backing crashes occur
• Generation of a framework for the estimation of potential safety benefits for these backing crash warning technologies
• Development and execution of objective tests for backing crash warning systems that provide information necessary for the estimation of such safety benefits
• Finalization and testing of a software tool that estimates the potential safety benefits of various backing crash countermeasures, leveraging the Simulink simulation environment in Matlab