Better Eyes for Your Car -- How automotive advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) drive the use of camera and radar systems.
In order for most ADAS to work, the car needs to develop its own situational awareness. This is easy for humans with their set of finely tuned senses all working together and a brain to process the information, but difficult for machines. When looking for something to mimic the functions of our eyes, cameras come to mind first as an artificial sense.
Basic camera systems in the car only display pictures or video to the driver, but do not interpret what they actually see. Those types of cameras would be back up cameras for park assist (allowing the driver to see behind the car) and surround view systems for a 360 degree view around the car, eliminating the need to even turn your head.
Another set of systems actually processes the images and determines if there is a threat for the driver/ car as well as provide additional information to the driver. Pedestrian detection, blind spot detection, obstacle detection, traffic sign recognition are all examples of those camera systems that provide more than just display an image. In these cases, signal processing technology and software to interpret the data are both key ingredients to give the car real machine vision capabilities. This basic situational awareness, in turn, allows the car to make its own decisions and paves the way to semi- autonomous driving capabilities and accident avoidance.
It is great to add new functions to a car, but it comes at the cost of additional wiring. With the wiring harness already one of the most complex and expensive pieces of real estate in the car, adding more wiring poses challenges. New means of communication like TI’s FPD-Link III Ser/Des interface ICs allow power, signal and control over only one single coaxial cable, thus reducing the needed wiring between camera / radar modules and displays or processing ECUs to one single wire. This reduces complexity, weight and the cost of the harness significantly.
Eyes like ours alone are not enough though. Unlike humans, for machines we can create new senses, allowing new capabilities. Radar systems are one of them. Radar systems function in lower resolution than visible light, but have the capability to see through fog and rain. Fusing this new sense of being able to sense for the driver through fog and rain (that is for example used in cruise control, distance warning, cross traffic detection) with the camera systems will allow “auto pilot” like autonomous driving features.
Nobody can tell exactly when self-driving cars will be a common sight on our streets, but a sensor fused ADAS will certainly play a key role in them.
For more information on TI’s Automotive Camera System Solutions check out ti.com/more to read about our winning combo, the FPD-Link III with Power-Over-Coax complete camera system solution for automotive.