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Automotive Industry

Hal is my co-pilot

Automotive Design & Production, August, 2004 by Christopher A. Sawyer

With some 40% of traffic fatalities resulting from vehicles going out of their lanes, government, industry and academia are all focusing on the ways and means to prevent this from happening. Here's a look at one project underway that could result in vehicle-installed systems by the end of the decade.

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"Lane departure warning systems are the first level in what will become a comprehensive system that looks around the car, evaluates the situation, conducts a threat assessment and warns the driver," says Scott Bogard, senior research engineer, Engineering Research Div., University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI). UMTRI is the prime contractor for the program (funded by the U.S. Department of Transportation under its Intelligent Vehicle Initiative) to evaluate just such a system. Developed and built by Visteon with the help of AssistWare Technology (Wexford, PA), the Road Departure Crash Warning (RDCW) system is fitted to a fleet of 11 Nissan Altima sedans that will be loaned to a total of 78 people for one month each. (See "Field Testing RDCW.")

"We are in the quote process for stand-alone systems that will provide the building blocks for a RDCW system," says Tim Tiernan, senior manager, Driver Awareness Systems at Visteon, "and they could hit the market in the 2007 or 2008 model year." But Tiernan says an integrated RDCW system will be available just two years later, making it feasible for the maker of a high-end vehicle to include it on the option list for its 2009 or 2010 models. "It's an aggressive timetable," Tiernan admits, "but one we think is well within reach."

The building blocks for the system are relatively simple: a 24 GHz radar unit on each side of the vehicle to provide blind spot warnings, a longer range forward-looking radar unit, a camera mounted near the rearview mirror to detect lane markings, and a navigation system that uses the latest high-definition digital maps. To this is added a set of "likely path" algorithms that determine the probability that the driver will follow a certain path given the choices available to him. This does two things: (1) it lets the system concentrate the bulk of its detection efforts on probable primary threats, and (2) enhances the lane departure function to include a lateral drift warning (to alert the driver if he is drifting off the intended path and into a situation that could result in a collision or rollover).

For all of its Buck Rogers connotations, Tiernan says the electronics necessary to integrate these systems into a cohesive unit are known quantities. "The basic threat assessment analysis could be done in the sensors themselves," he says, "which recognize the object and its location, and send this information through the high-speed CAN bus." Pre-processed information flowing from up to six radar units operating at 10 Hz each (Tiernan eventually envisions pairs of front and rear pre-crash warnings joining the side object detection units) could be handled by a 16-bit processor on the CAN bus, though the video system would need more silicon firepower. "An imaging chip won't give you processed information. It gives you an image," he says. "Which means there would be a need for digital signal processors and greater processing power to do the analysis." This 32-bit chip would decipher the information contained in the image and pass this along the CAN bus.

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Placement of the units around the car is a problem that Tiernan is working on both with OEMs and Visteon's business units. Though forward-looking cameras have gravitated toward placement in the inside rearview mirror housing, and side-looking radar units are a natural for outside mirror housings, the question of where the front or rear units reside is still up in the air. "Radar has no trouble looking 'through' plastic fascias, but this places them in a vulnerable position," says Tiernan, "and mounting them behind metal destroys their effectiveness." As designated safety systems that must be protected in collisions up to 5 mph, lighting units offer a package space that eliminates these worries. Currently, a 24-GHz radar sensor is slightly smaller than a standard 3X5 card, and likely would have to shrink in order to minimize their effect on the size of the lighting package.

And while OEMs haven't asked for the exact RDCW system currently undergoing field operation tests (they are awaiting the results from the UMTRI test to see how the technology works on the road, and how consumers will respond to it), the drive to add greater value and profit to a technology is leading them in this direction. "Already, vision systems are being used to determine road curvature so headlight beams can be adjusted before you get to a curve, or to do rudimentary threat assessment," says Tiernan. "When the entire suite of technologies is added to a vehicle, RDCW will be one of the added-value capabilities available to OEMs."

Automotive Industry

Hal is my co-pilot

Automotive Design & Production, August, 2004 by Christopher A. Sawyer

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