Accidents involving Vulnerable Road Users (VRU) are still a very significant issue for road safety. ´PROactive Safety for PEdestrians and CyclisTs´ is a collaborative research project funded by the European Commission. The objective of PROSPECT is to significantly improve the effectiveness of active VRU safety systems compared to those currently on the market by: (i) expanding the scope of scenarios addressed (ii) improving the overall Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) system performance (iii) proposing extensive validation methodologies. Concepts for sensors and control systems will be shown in three vehicle demonstrators and a mobile driving simulator and tested with novel VRU dummy specimen. Those systems address the well-known barriers of current AEB systems such as limited sensors field-of-view, fuzzy path prediction, unreliable intent recognition and slow reaction times for the actuation. The findings contribute not only to the augmentation of state-of-the-art knowledge but as well to technical innovations like assessment methodologies and tools for testing.