Last week, DVN and EPIC—the organisation of over 550 photonics companies—put on an online session dedicated to ADAS. Here we look at two of the presentations and provide time-indexed links directly to them; either of these links can be followed to view the entire 2.5-hour event.
Audi’s Reschke on Lighting Communication
Audi development engineer Johannes Reschke spoke about AV lighting communication with road users. He explained that the ighting communication Audi development engineer Johannes Reschke spoke about AV lighting communication with road users. can be done by the front, sides, and rear of the car to warn pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers and to advertise and advise that a car is driving autonomously. The information can be preseted by LED lights and by symbol displays; Audi’s in-house experimentation finds better recognition with symbol displays. As to the colour of the lights, Audi did a survey wherein respondents said white and yellow are preferred over violet.
Reschke also spoke on the future of lighting, with digital OLED started in the eTron and now in the Q5, and under aggressive active development to get its benefits of high contrast, precision, and multiple addressable segments.
PiezoWipe to clean sensors and lamps
Boris Kobrin, founder and CEO of Innovasonic, presented his company’s “PiezoWipe”, an integrated ultrasonic cleaning technology able to keep sensors, cameras, and headlamps perfectly clean in any weather condition.
The technology uses cleaning solution and transparent piezoelectric ultrasonic transducer meshes integrated with glass or plastic lenses or sensor covers. No mechanical scraping or heating is required, so the system does the job with low energy consumption.
The development was done with the French research institute CEA-Leti and the first prototype will be available shortly (within weeks), then Novasonic will approach automakers and their suppliers.