Global drive to collect autonomous data to boost road safety

The self-driving car or the autonomous vehicle in automotive parlance is currently on many a manufacturer’s advanced technology brief where vehicles in the future will have fully autonomous driving capability.

This, essentially, means that the car will take over the mundane daily driving tasks, but we are a while off from the technology being readily available.

Not in a sense of the technology development being a slow process per se, but rather that there are many variables to consider such as traditional cars that still require human intervention to be operated safely, as well as pedestrians and animals crossing the roads.

My first introduction to semi-autonomous driving came in the form of the current generation Mercedes-Benz E-Class fitted with all sorts of active and passive safety systems under the Intelligent Drive umbrella.

Among other things, this allows the vehicle to semi-autonomously steer itself around gentle bends, change lanes and bring the car to a stop during normal traffic conditions.

It still required the driver to touch the steering wheel every 30 seconds or so to ensure the system works as required otherwise the car will turn on the hazards, come to a complete stop and even send a signal to an emergency service centre to find your location.

Recently I experienced the next phase of the system fitted to an updated S-Class as a test mule. As you can see in the pictures, the vehicle is standard fare S-Class save for the decals, but then you slip into the cabin and take a peek in the boot, where things are quite different. Being a pre-production vehicle at the time, the cabin was not up to production levels of quality, but that is not what this exercise was all about.

There are stereo cameras mounted below the rearview mirror, which scan the road ahead for road markings, speed limits, pedestrians and animals and make vehicle inputs depending on the impending environment. These are projected on a screen mounted on the centre console that depicts the environment in a matrix with two dimensional graphics.

Bernhard Weidemann, research, development and environmental communications manager at Daimler AG, explained that the info and data gathered is then stored in hard drives in the boot, which can be later retrieved for analysis, imperative for further development of the system. According to Weidemann, some 50 gigabytes were collected in SA alone over just a few days with the vehicle being driven from Johannesburg to Cape Town.

Whether in the city or out in the country, SA has many pedestrians on the road. Sometimes they walk on the street and, more often than not, they cross lanes completely unexpectedly. In the dense urban traffic of Cape Town, where we had the co-drive in the Intelligent Drive S-Class, driving is truly a precision task, particularly in narrow streets, where the pavements are mostly overflowing with parked cars on both sides. But even on national roads outside of towns and on the motorway too, drivers always have to expect to encounter crossing pedestrians.

This, in essence, is what makes both SA and China — where the vehicles have been gathering data most recently — unique to the rest of the world.

The focus of the test drives in the Western Cape was on pedestrian detection in unfamiliar situations, both in busy city traffic as well as on rural roads. Furthermore, the test vehicle based on the S-Class was collecting information for detecting road signs specific to the country, validating the digital map material of Here maps and testing out a prototype of the innovative light system Digital Light.

The latter uses similar technology to that of a projector to display information onto the road itself via the headlamps’ high beam. The nondazzle continuous high beam in HD quality uses chips with more than 1-million micro-mirrors (pixels) per headlamp. Among other things it is able to project light corridors onto the road to communicate with its surroundings.

While the technology is still in its prototype form, it is fascinating at the very least and paves the way to go beyond what a headlight was initially designed to do — illuminate the road ahead and allow visibility for other road users.

Weidemann says the Western Cape data will assist in the research towards road safety and reducing fatalities, particularly those of pedestrians, which remains a major road safety issue in SA.

As for when the fully autonomous Mercedes-Benz S-Class might hit our roads, well, that is still a long way off.