Adaptive Headlights Could Help Drivers Avoid Hitting

Automotive Headlight – Improve Safety in low light/Poor Weather

The main purpose of an automotive headlight is to improve safety in low light as well as poor weather situations. However, inspite of innovation on light sources, several accidents tend to take place at night with even less traffic on the road.

Recent progress in adaptive lighting have addressed certain restrictions of standard headlights but they have limited flexibility like switching between high and low beams, turning off beams towards the opposing lane or rotating the beam as the vehicle turns.

 They are not designed for all driving environments.Present day cars are equipped with dozens of computers which monitor and adjust mechanical as well as electrical systems though the headlights need to be improved upon. Their light sources have evolved from acetylene and oil lamps to tungsten filaments to LEDs in the past century but an advanced headlight available on a luxury vehicle only tend to light whatever is in front of them.

These limitations could cause problems to the driver, as indiscriminate illumination tends to reflect light off, of the snow and rain during storms creating glare for oncoming drivers in dry weather which could also be dangerous.

Headlights to Adjust Instantly to Anti-Glare High Beams

Robotics researchers are developing a headlight which tends to adjust instantly to anti-glare high beams, improved driver visibility during changing conditions, enabling the driver to see through rain and snowstorm, increased contrast of lanes, follow GPS directions as well as early visual alerts of obstacles.

The ultra-low latency reactive visual system tends to sense, react as well as adapt quickly to any environment at the time of moving at highway speeds wherein the single hardware design can be programmed to accomplish various task.

These adaptive headlights coming to the market, features automatic dimmers, motors which reorient the headlight as the vehicle tend to turn or lighting arrays which change beam pattern in order to avoid shining in the oncoming driver’s eyes, for Audis, BMWs, Mercedes and some other costly vehicles.

Unfortunately even the smart headlight systems seem to have only one of these competences. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute are attempting to go beyond these issues by programming headlight which could improve the driver’s visibility by dynamically modifying to a wider variety of driving conditions.

Smart Headlight a Looped System

The team are working on developing a headlight system which would avoid illuminating raindrops or snowflakes in poor conditions, reducing glare when high beams are used, lights up the driving lane, much brighter than the adjacent lane and provide early visual alert of obstacles on the road.

The smart headlight is a looped system which tends to read continuously, assesses and reacts the driving conditions and the headlight camera senses and captures images in front of the vehicle which is analysed by the computer processor.

 It then utilises that information in controlling the headlight’s spatial light modulator, thereby dividing a single beam from the headlight into one million smaller beams each of which can be switched on or off when needed.

The researchers led by Professor Srinivasa Narasimhan, states that their system reduces the visibility of rain four meters away from the light source by 70% when the vehicle tends to move at 30 km per hour. The model equally reduces the visibility of snowflakes which fall more slowly and seem to be larger than raindrops by 60%.