NIRA Dynamics Presents New Software for Enhanced Driver Awareness

In Sweden, the most common culprit behind thousands of car accidents yearly is a slippery road. This number reaches an alarmingly high level worldwide. In a quest to reduce the number of road mishaps, and to enable for future vehicles to have efficient systems for Advanced Driver Assistance (ADAS), a car should be able to determine whether a road is slippery or not.

In winter, NIRA Dynamics has rolled out new software that detects road surface conditions in real-time, to a fleet of 80 vehicles. The company’s Road Surface Information (RSI) keeps track of the quality and tire grip level of road surface without adaptive suspension, stereo cameras or other expensive sensors. Using sensor fusion-based algorithms, the software can determine the level of road friction and road roughness.

Simply connecting RSI to a cloud service distributes road data to other vehicles, allowing motorists to adapt their driving style or change routes as they get information about upcoming hazards or risky situations. And this is just one example as the possibilities are endless.

To enable for a quick roll-out of this critical safety feature, instead of just integrating the software as OE in new passenger cars, NIRA, in partnership with Infocar Training AB, integrated the friction software on Infocar´s electronic device that plugs into the standard interface in all passenger cars since model year 2001. This allows NIRA to begin collecting and distributing this dynamic information about the road condition in real-time, every second, and send it to a back-end server. Users can then share this could data with other drivers, road authorities and systems for ADAS or for real time weather navigation data.