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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.
Way too complicated a solution for the problem. "Sorry, sir your headlight is not working. That'll be $2700 to fix it.
Just give the ability to automatically brighten and focus the lights on the slow driver ahead, the slower they get, the more focused the beams in their rear view and side mirrors.
That's all I need.
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.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Such over-engineered solution is probably works great on a clear night over smooth road with a new car. Try the same over potholed road, when entire front of your car is iced up, with a car that is now 6+ years old and both servos and sensors are worn.
My personal experiences with early generation of 'around the corner' adjustable headlights is that they visibly vibrate over bumps (you can see cutoff oscillate).
The bit you're apparently not grasping is something called a spatial light modulator.
You've probably encountered one as a digital cinema projector, or possibly even own one for PowerPoint presentations.
Couple it with a microwave radar or ultrasound sonar, and you can track individual raindrops and then cast shadows on them.
Sounds unnecessarily expensive for consumer automotive, but might be nice for buses/locomotives, emergency vehicles or passenger aircraft.
I can see the fnords!