AV safety technology: Why wait?

DETROIT — Self-driving vehicles hold the promise of reducing traffic deaths, but they're a long way from reaching the road in any meaningful numbers.

But the industry is increasingly convinced that, even if the whole package is still a work in progress, at least some of the basic technologies might come to market sooner to provide a degree of safety benefits.

During SAE International's WCX conference last week in Detroit, Intel and its Mobileye subsidiary pulled the curtain back on some of their efforts. The companies want to adapt the technologies they're pursuing for self-driving vehicles to use in present-day driver-assist applications, said Erez Dagan, executive vice president for products and strategy at the vision-systems supplier Mobileye, who delivered keynote remarks at the conference Wednesday morning.

"What started with the [autonomous vehicle's] duty to comprehend the human road safety system has evolved into an undeniable opportunity to dramatically improve it," Dagan told the industry audience.

"With a safety model that is fully measurable, interpretable and enforceable, we wondered — why wait for AVs to experience the life-saving benefits of this new reality," he said.

Intel created a formula in 2017 that determines how crashes occur and sets parameters to prevent self-driving vehicles from causing a crash. That includes, for example, ensuring that the vehicle maintains enough distance between itself and the car it's following to safely stop should the lead vehicle hit the brakes.

The supplier is now reconfiguring those autonomous formulas to work with human-driven vehicles of today that are equipped with advanced driver-assistance systems.

While the technology was originally envisioned for fully autonomous vehicles, Dagan said, "we can apply it to ADAS solutions now with immediate impact.

"This is what I believe is the next revolution in ADAS. It's a very human concept that's come full circle."

In operation, the system could act as an additional safety layer, maintaining safe following distances so that emergency automated braking would never be needed or that vehicles never drifted from their lane of travel.

In short, it could prevent troubling situations from developing into full-blown emergencies or crashes, the executive said.

He acknowledged that the concept is highly technical in nature but described the move as a broader social contract, intended to ensure everyone involved in the overall traffic environment has a common expectation of how vehicles should act.

"Digitizing the social contract will help make our roads safer," Dagan said, "with huge upside."