Autonomous cars use radar technologies to detect pedestrians, but it is not always perfect, sometimes there are obstacles, such as buildings or other vehicles.
Now they have introduced a new system that could ignore that problem by bringing radar to the streets, not just cars.
It is a part of the HORIS project that was born in Germany. It is made up of radar sensors connected to the infrastructure, whether they are streetlights, pedestrian crossings, bus stops … anywhere.
The sensors are responsible for scanning the area 100 times per second, identifying people and determining the speed of each moving object. In this way the direction of each element is known, its current position and its position can even be predicted in the future. The objective is to determine if a pedestrian is heading to the road at the same time as a car, and various accidents can be avoided.
For this, the system will issue an alert, a wireless signal that the cars will receive, so that any equipped car will see moving objects in the area, regardless of whether or not there is visual contact. The system might even be able to automatically activate the brakes on those cars.
The platform that is being developed could also issue alerts if there is an area with a lot of pedestrian traffic, and all without cameras that violate anyone’s privacy.
At the moment the technology is still under development, it is being tested at a bus stop on the campus of the Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt university with two radar sensors that can monitor up to eight people at a time.
