Harman Develops Technology to Help Improve Road Safety

It is the age of 5G. Everyone is aware about how 5G can make internet a lot faster, and make it possible to download even long movies in just a few seconds. It does however have a lot more applications and Harman, which is owned by Samsung is currently working on technology to use 5G to help improve road safety by using vehicle-to-pedestrian technology to make motorists aware of pedestrians in their blindspots. This technology will make it possible for cars to know the location of up to 2,500 5G devices which are within a range of 1 kilometer.

This information is updated almost in real time with a lag of just 10 milliseconds and constantly fed into an algorithm. Using this data, it is possible for the connected vehicle to accurately predict the movements of pedestrians ahead, around and behind it. In the vent that there is a pedestrian in the driver’s blind spot, or if it seems that they are about to step out into the road, the driver gets a warning from the system.

Commenting on the technology, Vishnu Sundaram, vice president of telematics at Harman said that with cars and phones talking to each other, they would be able to exchange beacon information which could make it possible for vehicles to get alerts about distracted pedestrians who are about to cross the road, or pedestrians who might be in the blind spots of approaching cars. Sundaram said Harman has already finalized agreements with vehicle manufacturers including a premium German brand, to use this technology in their new models which would be available to customers in the 2021 to 2022 timeframe.

Getting an alert

It is upto each manufacturer about the means they would use to send alerts to the driver. One option Harman has explored is the integration of the system into a car’s head-up display, in which case the HUD’s interface would indicate the direction of the pedestrian’s approach. There need not be any security or privacy concerns as the system is completely anonymous, and no personal data would be exchanged between smartphones and vehicles. The information that is exchanged between the vehicles and the devices would have details like location, heading and speed. The phone keeps sending this beacon information and the cars have a target classification algorithm which would run the details thus obtained.