Extract of Dr. Michael Hamm lecture
Many research projects driven by various scientific studies were published before mainstream interest in ADB systems developed. Up to now, these findings have not been available in a comprehensive form. Vehicle lighting luminary Dr. Michael Hamm reviewed the literature to provide a clear overview about the already-available scientific research in the various topics covering ADB systems.
High beam usage, with and without instruction
In his PhD work, Sprute investigated the impact of manual and automatic high beam switching and compared the results with future technologies in the field of adaptive high beam systems. He investigated Adaptive Cut Off, Matrix, and Adaptive Driving Beam systems. One of his first investigations was the usage of high beam in manual (blind), guided manual (non blind) and automatic switching. During the blind test phase, on average 38% of the track distance was driven with high beam (corresponding to 29.5% of driving time). This relation changes significantly when the drivers are instructed to use the high beam as often as possible; then the high beam usage time rises to 52% of total driving time—a much greater proportion of the roughly 71% of driving distance during which high beams would have been appropriate to use. This investigation showed that manual beam selection is not sufficient and there is a large potential to improve nighttime visibility by automatic and adaptive high beam systems.
High beam usage with simple adapive low beam assistance function
In a paper for ISAL 2007, Böhm presented a study about an adaptive cutoff (ACOL) system that improved the detection distance and gave in parallel the real driver behaviour without such system. Drivers were activating the high beam in 19% of driving time. With adaptive support, 36.5% ACOL, 50.6% high beam and only 12.9% of all time the low beam would have been appropriate. In the study, 4 out of 20 persons did not activate high beam at all. 11 test persons forgot between once and thrice to switch back to low beam.