The system can potentially mitigate the severity of accidents and therefore help improve driver and passenger safety. Automatic emergency braking (AEB) combines advanced environmental sensing and brake systems to slow a vehicle and potentially lessen the severity of an impact when a collision is unavoidable.
TRW say their AEB systems can utilise long range radar (LRR) or medium range radar (MRR) in combination with a video camera. These sensors independently gather data, the LRR or MRR looks forward in a long but narrower field of view while the camera covers a wider field of view and helps detect and classify objects such as other vehicles.
The data gathered by each of these sensors is fed to the control unit and is constantly compared every 40 milliseconds in what is called data fusion: both sensors need to independently verify the criticality of a foreseeable crash and confirm that AEB should be deployed.