Smart cars are a new breed of car that are revolutionizing the automotive industry. They have a range of features that make them more convenient, safer and less time-consuming than traditional vehicles.
With a wide variety of technologies, including AI and gesture control, smart cars are set to boom the automotive industry over the next 5-10 years. So, let’s take a closer look at what these cars can do.
Gesture Control
Gesture control is a feature that allows you to interact with your vehicle without touching any buttons. It can be found on select BMW models and is a great way to improve your driving experience.
In addition to allowing you to control your car’s features, gesture control is also beneficial for driver safety. With it, you can adjust your air flow and volume, wave away incoming calls on a connected phone or change music playlists with a flick of the wrist.
While Time-of-Flight (ToF) based 3-D hand gesture recognition is an important technology for advancing human-computer interaction in automobiles, the cost and complexity of this approach has limited its adoption to high-end cars. Vishay’s design solution integrates optics, sensing and an analog front-end in a small optical side-wettable QFN package that dramatically reduces the cost of a gesture recognition ASIC, enabling this important technology to be included in a wider tier of automobiles.
Voice Control
Voice control is a vital technology for Smart Cars, with the ability to communicate information from the vehicle to the driver using speech. This allows users to get directions, make phone calls, play music, and check the weather and news all without having to take their hands off the wheel or look down at a screen.
Historically, however, in-car voice command systems have been less successful, especially those that failed to understand their user’s language and accent. These clunky systems also required drivers to read on-screen menus, which took their eyes off the road and made them less safe.
With recent advances in artificial intelligence, the voice recognition of cars is now a much more sophisticated and natural process that recognises more conversational speech patterns. This will eventually revolutionise voice control as it can be used for a wide range of commands and functions.
Virtual Reality
The automotive industry is a hotspot for virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). It’s a billion-dollar market that is expected to keep growing as computers get more powerful.
The most exciting uses for VR are in design, which allows companies to create prototypes in an immersive environment. This can help them save time and money, and reduce their manufacturing costs.
In addition, virtual reality is useful for training new operators of heavy-duty equipment that are used in harsh environments. This can ensure that they are fully prepared for their tasks before being put into service.
In a similar way, virtual reconstructions could be used by government agencies to study road safety and make informed decisions about infrastructure design. This could improve transportation by reducing accidents and making roads safer for all.
Self-Driving
Self-driving cars rely on sophisticated software to process sensory data from the car’s cameras, radar and lidar systems. This enables the vehicle to monitor its surroundings, understand traffic rules and respond to unexpected situations.
The software also helps the car’s actuators – which control acceleration, steering and braking – to plot a course and avoid obstacles. It also uses hard-coded rules, obstacle avoidance algorithms, predictive modeling and object recognition to keep it safe on the road.
But self-driving technology is still prone to glitches. Take the case of a pedestrian killed by a driverless Uber in San Francisco last year.
While fully autonomous cars have been tested in several areas around the world, they’re still a ways off from becoming available to the public. Regulatory and consumer challenges are likely to delay their rollout.
