Vehicle design for Vulnerable Road Users
An important and ever increasingly complex topic for automotive products is designing to meet, and exceed, regulations regarding vulnerable road users (VRU) such as pedestrians and cyclists. 
This is a topic not just for cars, trucks and buses but also for heavy equipment machinery such as excavators, cranes and fork lift trucks. Each of these sectors have similar, but different, regulations for driver visibility of their surroundings; and for cars and light trucks there are various regulations regarding pedestrian protection in different countries around the world.
NX has a number of tools within its Vehicle Design Automation module to address these design challenges. These include mirror certification tests to FMVSS and ECE standards, close range visibility validation to MLIT standards and Euro NCAP, GB and GTR regulation calculations for pedestrian protection.
This topic is however expanding, putting more demands on products, designers and the tools they use. For example, European cities are starting to define regulations restricting access of trucks on their roads based on how effective they are at reducing direct and indirect blind spots to cyclists around the vehicle. With Autonomous vehicles (AV) and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) using different vision technologies, design and simulation tools need to not just handle direct eye and indirect mirror sight lines but also calculate fields of view for camera, Lidar, sonar and radar.
With this in mind I would like to invite you to a NX VDA (General Packaging) Round Table discussion at Realize Live in Detroit on 11th June 2019. Here we can review current tools in NX to assist with concept layout placement of vision devices and detailed validation of final designs, as well discuss what will be required by the market in the future.
Current functionality will be presented the day before in the Automotive Packaging and Safety Regulations Validation breakout lecture.
Steven Vickers NX Product Manager
