Distracted driving at 55 mph for five seconds is the same as driving with your eyes closed the length of a football field. Let that sink in.
In honor of April being Distracted Driver Awareness Month, let’s address the importance of safer driving.
Motor vehicle crashes are a leading cause of death in many countries. In the United States alone, crashes kill over 100 people a day. Unwanted accidents often occur by human error using a mobile device—texting and talking—while driving. Drivers can also be impacted by other riders in the vehicle. While these examples are human-induced, today’s intelligent cars can help mitigate many of these accidents from happening via Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS).
In modern vehicles, driver safety is enhanced with ADAS—including blind spot detection (BSD), automatic emergency braking (AEB), lane departure warnings (LDW), and forward collision warnings (FCW). These systems use a variety of built-in sensors to detect and respond to the surrounding environment. To reduce the number of accidents, injuries and fatalities, regulators and vehicle original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) aim to bring uncrashable cars to market. To get there, the industry must address several technological and commercial challenges.
As we raise awareness through Distracted Driver Awareness Month, I wanted to share a round-up of articles and blogs I’ve published on the topic of ADAS and driver assistance. Let’s explore.
Embedded Computing Design: Automotive Safety Through Multi-Modal Sensing Industry’s interest in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems grows
“Governments are increasingly mandating safety features in new vehicles, which are enabled by ADAS. For example, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has recently announced several ADAS-related vehicle safety initiatives, including proposed rules to require seat belt warning systems, AEB, and pedestrian AEB (PAEB) in select vehicles. … In the European Union, a global leader in automotive safety regulation, the Vehicle General Safety Regulation introduced in 2022, now also mandates ADAS applications including intelligent speed assistance, reverse detection of vulnerable road users such as pedestrians and cyclists with driver distraction detection and warning. The legislation also establishes a legal framework for approval of automated and fully driverless vehicles.”
“It’s clear that driver and road user safety adoption is being supported and promoted by safety regulations, NCAPs, and improved Consumer awareness. Yet, innovation is also a key factor. OEMs need to develop and implement new and more efficient sensor and processing technologies.”
To read the full article, click here.
Automotive Industries: indie Semiconductor’s Vision for Uncrashable Cars and the Future of Automotive Technology with Chet Babla, SVP Strategic Marketing
ADAS applications rely on various sensor modalities to gather data about the vehicle’s exterior and interior environment
“In the context of vehicle motion dynamics, this data needs to be processed to enable timely decision-making and trigger automated safety response actions such as braking, steering, or driver alerts. This is where the work that we’re doing at indie comes in. As part of our key offerings, indie is focused on providing highly integrated hardware and software solutions for ADAS and multi-modal sensing. indie brings together mixed-signal semiconductor, software, and system expertise to create next-generation, best-in-class technologies that will improve performance, simplify implementation, and support application-level differentiation.”
“Working with indie, automotive manufacturers can more easily address the integration of a wide variety of sensor modalities and the efficient processing of ever-higher volumes of data while keeping both system power consumption and the overall bill of materials as low as possible.”
To read the full article, click here.
AutoVision News: Enabling Mass-Market ADAS Adoption With Distributed Intelligence Automotive Architectures
With multiple sensors to detect and analyze a vehicle’s surrounding environment, ADAS feeds valuable data back to the driver so they—or the vehicle’s actuation systems—can react promptly if a crash or dangerous situation occurs.
“A distributed architecture can help overcome the limitations of the central compute approach. It distributes vehicle sensing, control, actuation, and processing functions across edge, zone, and vehicle compute ECUs. … Distributed intelligence enables a more scalable architecture across vehicle classes, potentially reducing system power and costs. Reduced processing power is achieved because various sensor data can be processed closer to the sensors at the vehicle edge. This creates real-time feedback and perception, and the resulting pre-processed data is aggregated into zones for further downstream processing and perception. This approach reduces the transported raw sensor data volume and alleviates some of the interfacing, cabling (cost and weight), and thermal challenges often encountered in a central compute architecture.”
“The benefits of a distributed E/E architecture—its ability to ease system design, integration, and cost challenges—are being revisited by the automotive industry. As a result, semiconductor vendors are innovating to develop edge-based vision sensing and perception solutions that enable distributed intelligence, helping OEMs make better decisions about their vehicle platform needs.”
To read the full article, click here.
indie Blog: Keeping an Eye on Alertness with Driver Monitoring Systems
Driven by a combination of legislation, industry initiatives and consumer expectations, safety for both vehicle occupants and other road users has risen to the top of the automakers’ agenda.
“When it comes to safety, vision-based monitoring plays a crucial role in helping to reduce potential accidents, improving emergency response, and complying with regulations in the evolving landscape of automotive technology. … While public awareness campaigns and hands-free connectivity have contributed to reducing this risk, in-cabin monitoring is an important evolution for driver safety and automated assistance.”
To read the full blog, click here.
The Benefits of ADAS Technology are Clear
This month let’s take the time to remember the importance of road safety, and how we can each do our part to help keep our friends and neighbors safe on the road. Innovative automotive solutions such as ADAS and distributed intelligence help to mitigate these challenges, but it’s on each of us as people to be smarter and more alert on the road.
To learn more about indie’s offerings, visit: https://indiesemi.com/redefining-driver-safety-and-automation/