What is New about car accident prevention systems in the world ?
One of the latest entries in rear-end collision avoidance is a visual system, Mobileye from Mobileye Vision Technologies. One feature of the Mobileye system is that it monitors not only vehicles in front but also the driver’s position in the lane. Mobileye combines a small windshield-mounted video camera, a processing unit, and audio and visual alerts.

East West Express, a 55-truck refrigerated LTL carrier based in Calgary, Alberta, is the first commercial fleet to test this virtual “third eye.” President Tom deWaal discovered the product while doing online research about driver assistance systems and liked it because it offered assistance in prevention of rear-end crashes and unintended lane departure. East West Express currently is using a pre-production model of the Mobileye system on a Kenworth W900. Superimposed on the black-and-white video display in deWaal’s test vehicle are green lines tracing the lane markings along the vehicle’s path. Surrounding vehicles are traced in white boxes, and distance from the truck is displayed. When vehicles are too close, the white boxes turn red, giving a visual cue to the problem.

“[Mobileye] mimics the decision process of what the mind goes through,” deWaal says. It also uses audible signals to capture the driver’s attention. If a driver gets too close to the lane markings with the turn signal off, a rumble strip sound comes from the left or right speaker, depending on which lane marking the truck drifts toward. Besides the visual red marking, the system also emits audible warnings when vehicles are too close in the vehicle’s headway.

The compact camera captures data in pixels. The data is sent through a cable to a small processing unit, Mobileye’s EyeQ System on a Chip, which processes it in real time (30 screens per second). The processing platform uses proprietary algorithms to determine the vehicle’s position in relation to lane markings and the speed and position of surrounding objects relative to the truck, deWaal says.

Mobileye’s optional interfaces with USB ports allow recordings on Flash memory of collision warnings. East West Express plans to use this memory feature to monitor drivers’ responses to the collision warning signals, deWaal says. By looking at a hard braking event, for example, he could tell if the incident was caused by a driver ignoring the warning or by a sudden lane cut-in from another vehicle.

The system can be used for blind-spot detection in other areas surrounding the vehicle. This function can be combined with lane change assist, which looks 60 to 70 meters backward and analyzes velocity and position of approaching vehicles to indicate whether a lane change would be safe, says Meny Benady, vice president of marketing and business development for Mobileye Vision Technologies.

After testing Mobileye for more than 37,000 kilometers, deWaal plans to install the production model in all trucks. Production versions of Mobileye will be available this December for $1,500 per unit, Benady says.