WABCO advances autonomous through ADAS

WABCO advances autonomous through ADAS

WABCO was busy near the end of 2016, bringing its advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) to multiple partnerships to advance autonomous driving and platooning of commercial vehicles. The supplier is working with Silicon Valley-based Peloton Technology to further develop its solution for truck platooning that uses vehicle-to-vehicle communication to sync the braking and acceleration between the trucks. WABCO’s OnGuardACTIVE collision mitigation system, with its 77-GHz radar sensor, is a key enabler of the platoon’s trucks, according to CTO, Dr. Christian Wiehen.

The company also signed a Memorandum of Understanding with an Asian Tier 1 automotive supplier to establish a new joint-venture business that will develop, manufacture and sell electronically controlled active-steering systems for the global truck and bus market. This integration of braking, vehicle control and ADAS with the Tier 1’s active steering will support automated driving through intelligent control of both the longitudinal and lateral movements of vehicles, Wiehen said. WABCO already has worked with ZF to develop Evasive Maneuver Assist, an active steering system demonstrated on the ZF Innovation Truck 2016 prototype.

And yet another agreement, with Mobileye, combines Mobileye’s REM (Road Experience Management) vision and mapping technology with WABCO’s active safety systems, in combination with active steering control. Wiehen recently spoke with TOHE about its activities.

What are the next steps to full autonomy?

We see it as a long evolution through various gates of automated driving—you may know of the SAE categorization of different degrees of automation (SAE J3016 - read more at http://articles.sae.org/15021/). That will take us several years, I think more than a decade before we [reach] driverless vehicles. Along the way, we are bringing several technologies which will get us there. One was 20 years back, electronic braking. That was the first [step]—that provided the possibility to actuate the brakes from an electronic control signal rather than the driver pressing a brake pedal. The same thing is happening today for steering, where we have the possibility to actuate the steering system independent from the driver. So that's the base capability which we need to provide, and then of course it requires a lot of information, sensor data and decision-making in order to activate these subsystems. For example, forward-looking technology—we have better radars, we’re combining information from cameras to better identify the objects to which we need to react and discriminate from those for which we don’t need to react. False positives are a real problem which we want to avoid. So we are refining these autonomous emergency braking systems, and we are adding 360-degree vision for a ‘safety cocoon’ around the vehicle. 

Read more : http://articles.sae.org/15228/