Drivers who turn on their high-beam headlights during heavy snowfall quickly learn what the term "blinding snowstorm" really means. Light bounces off the flakes and returns to the driver's eye, ruining forward vision. Now, however, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's (CMU) Robotics Institute believe they've found a solution to that problem. By combining projector-type headlights with camera-based sensors, they believe they can direct light between snowflakes or raindrops, reducing the reflection that temporarily blinds the driver.
"We can illuminate the space around the particles," Srinivasa Narasimhan, associate professor of robotics at CMU, told us. "And we can do it because we now have a way to control light over space and time."
Carnegie Mellon University created a smart headlight system that directs light between rain drops or snowflakes. (Source: CMU)
CMU's development relies on automakers to go beyond traditional headlights, to light sources such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs), liquid crystal displays (LCDs), or Digital Light Processing (DLP). By combining one of those light sources with camera-based sensors and a microprocessor, CMU researchers have proven that they can locate the offending droplets and turn off the light pixels that would otherwise scatter off them.
"For a long time, the automotive headlight has been a bulb with mirrors and lenses to process the beam," Narasimhan said. "Here, we want to use a light projector instead of a bulb. That way, we have a million pixels that we can control."
The heart of the system is the powerful software developed at CMU, which recognizes the speeding precipitation droplet and turns off the correct pixel in response to it. The software -- along with the light source, sensor, and an Intel quad core i7 processor -- form an embedded system that that reads the sensor signal and orchestrates the on/off reaction at each pixel.
The key to the system's ability to do that is the co-location of the light projector and the camera. CMU employs a splitter to send out a beam of light and pick up the reflected light from the same pixel. It does all this -- captures the image, processes the data, and projects the light -- in a scant 13ms. Ultimately, the researchers want to reduce that time to about 2ms to 3 ms, which they said would enable the system to work in a raging thunderstorm on a car driving 60 mph. To bring the time down, they plan to incorporate the light source, sensor, and processor chip in a single embedded system. "What we need is tight integration between the LCD, camera, and embedded computer," Narasimhan said. "With everything tightly coupled, we can bring the time down by eight milliseconds."
Very cool development and one that would come in extremely handy in the Northeast where I live. Interesting to see once again software at the heart of driving this kind of new innovation. But waiting a decade to see the technology commercialized--that seems like an awful long time and in not in keeping with today's vastly accelerated time-to-market cycles.
You are correct that the ten year time frame seems long. The tightly coupled embedded systems are available now. Various chip makers have SOCs that can handle this today. On the other hand, it then has to be integrated into the car. Autos are not typically built to be that modular.
Nowadays is relatively easy to integrate external systems in automotive electronics. Even this technological solution could be just reduced in a small compact module placed on its final location at the headlight.
At the moment I think the evolution would be necessary only in the technology of light, for getting compact projectors for high-intensity light (such as current headlight) and low cost, for being a reliable and viable proyect.
I agree with Roberto. It's much easier today to integrate this type of system in current cars. Ten years to too long.
It's definitely a great after market opportunity for an entrepreneur. But, that does bring up the question of Creative Commons. Will it be proprietary or is it considered important enough for general safety to be shared. I would hate to think I'd have to buy a Ford to get these great headlights.
The Digital Light Processing (DLP) technology was invented at Texas Instruments back in 1987, so this application has been technically feasible for 25 years, but just now being demonstrated. Another 10-years to commercialization sounds long, but in the grand scheme of things it sounds about right. Especially if you are talking about a safety device that must be developed and then tested and approved by the NHTSA.
Heck... I'm still waiting for my flying car and they were invented in the 1950s...
Even if the equipment could be just developed in a profitable way, there are a lot of parameters to control and logical problems to solve during the software programing. By the time a solution has been implemented which only works in test enviroment, with homogeneous and static background, and a small deep of falling drops. I think the final solution needs a video signal processing much more complex to deal successfully with real situations, as the great deep of field of falling drops or dinamic and much more random and irregular background. Even the water over the surface of the camera lenses (don´t forget that it's raining!) must be taken into account, getting very difficult to process distorted pictures.
Hopefully that is not just pie in the sky. Such as in other fields, I think though we could have the technology, we still don't know how to use it efficiently and to trasmit a final solution to the market.
Good point about all the gyrations a technology has to go through in terms of being properly vetted by a safety board. Even so, 10 years is such a long time--given the state of technology today, it could be obsolete by then.
Good point about all the gyrations a technology has to go through in terms of being properly vetted by a safety board. Even so, 10 years is such a long time--given the state of technology today, it could be obsolete by then.
The concept seems to have a flaw, as the reflection has to take into account the users (driver) eye location. If you move your head, that changes. This would require an eye position sensor and modifcation of the control parameters to account for movement, making calculations even more complex. Between sensing, calculating and controlling there are too many potential failures to achieve robust reliability.
Ultimately the effort and cost would seem to be a lot for a small benefit over just using the low beams and slowing down. If it did manage to work sometimes, it would soon degrade driver skill, and when the inevitable failure happened, the results would be worse than before.
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