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NEWS
Toyota's baby steps towards vehicle autonomy
Big T offers an "intelligent" cruise system with the reassurance it's not the end of drivingToyota has announced it will begin installing semi-autonomous driving technologies in its cars from the middle of this decade.
As part of this week's 20th Intelligent Transport Systems World Congress in Tokyo, the Japanese giant has revealed a Lexus LS research vehicle armed with its first strands of the technology, dubbed Automated Highway Driving Assist (AHDA) and Lane Trace Control, along with a pedestrian safety package labelled Pre-Collision System (PCS).
AHDA is an advanced adaptive cruise system, labelled "cooperative cruise" for the way it functions not by the normal radar but through wireless car-to-car communications. Cars equipped with the gear provide each other with constant real-time acceleration, coasting, braking and location updates, improving the precision of vehicle separation and eliminating the errors made by radar's analogue spatial sensory systems.
This will show up in smoother separation and reductions in unnecessary acceleration and braking, with commensurate improvements to fuel efficiency and traffic flow.
The downside: it's near pointless until every car in town is equipped with it. That might be a while, given Toyota says it will turn up around 2015. Expect a trickle-down implementation, starting with high-end product like the LS, and making its way down through Lexus and Toyota model lineups from there.
Trials of the technology will start on Tokyo's Shuto Expressway this week.
Past AHDA, the technologies traverse more familiar territory. Lane Trace Control marries camera and radar monitoring to sense unintentional lane departures, making its calculations and adjusting steering, power and braking to correct things.
PCS marries forward sensory systems with automated braking and steering to give cars the ability to avoid pedestrians and other objects ahead. When the sensory systems – Toyota doesn't say if they're radar or optical – detect an obstacle, the car first gives the driver audio-visual warning. If the driver doesn't respond quickly enough, it automates the brakes and steering to pull the vehicle up and swerve into what it detects is clear space.
Toyota is cautious of possible backlash against technologies that appear to wrest control of cars away from human beings. The company "recognises the importance of the driver being in ultimate control of a vehicle," it said in its statement about the technologies. It's therefore "aiming to introduce AHDA and other advanced driving support systems where the driver maintains control and the fun-to-drive aspect of controlling a vehicle is not compromised.
"Toyota plans to market the newly developed AHDA in the mid-2010s and other driving support systems as soon as possible to provide safe and secure means of transportation," the statement said.
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Written byJeremy Bass
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