Smart Headlights Adjust To Aid Drivers In Difficult Conditions

An anonymous reader writes: Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute are developing smart headlights that not only trace a car's movement around bends, but are programmable to assist a driver in a wide range of driving conditions. The research team, at the institute's Illumination and Imaging Laboratory, is looking into designing headlights which do not highlight raindrops and snowflakes in bad weather, instead passing light around the individual drops and improving visibility. Its near-future design would also be able to avoid glare even when the high beam is in use, detecting up-coming vehicles and disabling the range of light that is directed at it. They also hope to incorporate GPS data to adjust the direction of the headlights according to the lane that a driver is occupying, illuminating it more brightly compared to surrounding lanes. The technology is supported by a looped system which will constantly read, assess and react to driving conditions. The prototype also features a built-in camera to capture visual data before transferring it to a computer processor installed in the vehicle, where it can be analyzed.

Comments

We have prototypes of these, working

[smellsofbikes]

I did a bunch of work recently on a headlight that automatically dims just the area around a detected oncoming car, so you can drive with your brights on all the time and it'll automatically filter out detected oncoming traffic so they don't get blinded.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
(Sucks to be a pedestrian in this world, though...)
It uses steering wheel position, input from a webcam, and gps and map data to determine where the beam distribution is directed. This specific implementation only works on red cars, but we have some good ideas about how to generalize this.
Current car lights are already optimized somewhat to illuminate further and higher on the outside side of the car compared to the inside, to reduce glare for oncoming drivers. Doing this automatically, over a wider area, will be a nice stopgap until autonomous vehicles render this whole focus irrelevant.