Mitsubishi Electric Corporation and Here Technologies have successfully piloted a vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications system that enables them to automatically warn each other about upcoming road hazards with lane-level precision.
At the end of March, the two companies successfully completed field tests of the Lane Hazard Warning technology in California in the USA. The new tests followed a successful trial in Ibaraki Prefecture in Japan last winter. The companies now intend to make the technology available broadly to automakers for them to test in their vehicles. The Lane Hazard Warning system enables an event that has been detected by a vehicle’s sensors, such as a disabled or slow car, a slippery road, debris or a pothole, to be precisely localized to a specific lane and this information can then be transmitted in real-time via the cloud to other vehicles approaching the same area.
Lane Hazard Warning uses a vehicle’s sensors together with HD Locator, Mitsubishi Electric’s precise centimeter-level positioning technology, and the Here Open Location Platform, the collaborative big location data platform. The partners believe that the real-time sharing of the ultra-precise location of incidents from car-to-cloud-to-car can help boost driver and road safety and fuel other new services. As part of their broad collaboration, which has been in operation since 2017, the companies are also evaluating the application of the technology in automatic updates of maps for connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) using the cloud, as well as in a service that alerts cities and road maintenance authorities to pavement surface degradation.
“When something unusual happens on the road ahead, drivers often have very little time to react and that can put them and their passengers at risk,” explained Hiroshi Onishi, executive officer and group president of automotive equipment at Mitsubishi Electric. “Together with Here Technologies, we’ve developed a new system designed to give drivers a few valuable extra seconds or minutes to prepare for a potential danger on the road ahead, such as by switching lanes or simply driving with greater caution. We’re excited about the potential of this system in improving driver safety.”
Jørgen Behrens, senior vice president and head of applications and services at Here Technologies, commented, “With Mitsubishi Electric, we are showing how your car can learn from the experiences of other cars on the road to make for a much safer driving experience. We believe fast, accurate and targeted hazard alerts will be a critical part of the data infrastructure required for automated driving and smart city services. We look forward to seeing this technology in the market.”
