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Future Cars to Project Direction of Travel on the Road to Warn Pedestrians

With so much going on in the auto industry, from the rise of electric vehicles to the increasingly concentrated efforts to make them drive themselves, it’s very difficult to say how the future of motoring will look like. But one thing is certain: it will be all about sharing.
JLR self-driving car projections system 5 photos
Photo: Jaguar Land Rover
JLR projection system for autonomous carsJLR projection system for autonomous carsJLR projection system for autonomous carsJLR projection system for autonomous cars
From information about incidents ahead to the color of the streetlights three blocks away, there’s nothing the cars of the future will not know in advance. For cars, driving in this shared and connected world will be as safe as the confines of a metal garage.

But how about pedestrians? Will they feel safe having automated cars driving all over with no human behind the wheel to pin the blame on for a possible incident?

Probably not. Another emergent fear of the modern day humans, aside for the one already known as range anxiety, is that a self-driving car might harm them.

To put this fear to rest, several companies are working on technologies meant to “gain pedestrian trust.” And one such company is Jaguar Land Rover, which last week presented its idea of a projection system meant to communicate a self-driving car’s intentions to the humans near it.

The system is in fact a projector that paints the road in front with light. A series of lines is used to show whether the car intends to stop, accelerate, or turn left or right.

The light bars are dynamic, meaning they can space out or come closer together to signal acceleration or deceleration, or they can bend to the left or right to show direction of movement. In the future, says Jaguar Land Rover, they might also be used to “share obstacle detection and journey updates with pedestrians.”

The system is currently being tested by JLR on Aurrigo autonomous pods as part of the UK’s Autodrive project.

This government-backed program is the same that gave birth over the course of last year to Ford’s Intersection Priority Management and parking space crowd-sourcing technology.
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About the author: Daniel Patrascu
Daniel Patrascu profile photo

Daniel loves writing (or so he claims), and he uses this skill to offer readers a "behind the scenes" look at the automotive industry. He also enjoys talking about space exploration and robots, because in his view the only way forward for humanity is away from this planet, in metal bodies.
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