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Thread: So... collision avoidance?

  1. #31
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    I would love Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) but I'm a little concerned about how we are reducing the amount of driving responsibility without eliminating it as we move towards fully autonomous cars. As the drive gets less and less to do, he could become less vigilant. Until we have fully autonomous cars, the driver must still react to emergencies.

    If I do get ACC, I'm hoping to delay a purchase until ACC gets Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) communications. Right now, ACC is just your vehicle reading it's surroundings. The next generation will still do that but it will also communicate with the car ahead of you. If the guy ahead barely taps his brakes, your car will act more like a shock absorber than an amplifier.

    Currently, in a brake tap situation in heavy traffic, Car A taps brakes. Car B sees that and taps a little harder. Car C taps a little harder and so on until you have a full traffic jam for absolutely no good reason.

    With ACC+V2V, Car A taps the brakes. Car B gets updates about just how much the brake pedal was depressed and for how long. It factors that against Car A's relative distance and takes the minimum action to remain safe. Car C probably won't even know what happened. No traffic jam.

    This is done with Bluetooth using something called Angle of Arrival (AoA) where Car B can tell that a BT connection came from the car ahead based on the direction of the signal.

    If I were buying a car today, I would definitely pay for the OEM backup camera. I have an aftermarket one on my XTerra (lousy visibility) and it doesn't include lines showing distance or the lines showing your backup path. I think you have to go with the OEM camera for that stuff.

    Ditto on wanting CarPlay or MirrorLink (mirror my smartphone to the car screen). Check the HandsFree compatibility with your phone. There are big differences in how various car HandsFree kits work with various phones.

    At the very least,
    -- make and receive a phone call using the phonebook in your phone
    -- send and receive a text
    -- I would also test the kit to see how it works with two phones paired up.
    -- With two phones paired and connected, play some audio from one phone and they try to initiate audio from the other
    -- With two phones paired and connected, start a phone call and then receive a call from another phone and see how it interrupts.

    And so on. You would need a total of 3 phones. Two paired and connected and one not paired.

    You might also see what happens when you are talking on the phone and then walk into Bluetooth range with the car running. Do you lose the signal because the car took over your audio?

  2. #32
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    Interesting food for thought, Roger. Thanks for posting all that. My company is heavily involved with IOT (internet of things) and this squarely fits in and is not something I had thought about. Very cool.
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  3. #33
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    Quote Originally Posted by Chris Padilla View Post
    Interesting food for thought, Roger. Thanks for posting all that. My company is heavily involved with IOT (internet of things) and this squarely fits in and is not something I had thought about. Very cool.
    I think it's fair to say that my company is also squarely in the middle of IOT. I work for Frontline Test Equipment (recently acquired by Teledyne Lacroy). We are a leading provider of protocol analyzers and have been deep into Bluetooth since it was first invented.

    I write the decoders for Frontline which is to say that I'm the guy that takes the packets apart and makes them look pretty. I work with Bluetooth, USB, Serial, NFC, Ethernet, 802.11, SDIO and a host of industrial protocols. My work is mostly Bluetooth but we go where the market seems to be heading. It a bit of a trick figuring out where the market is going and then staying ahead of it.

    It's fun work and it pays well but there's not too much call for sniffing stuff around the house.

    When I get my new shop, I would guess that there's a CNC router with my name on it somewhere. It will be interesting to sniff the usb link. Maybe I will write a plug-in for our software that shows the tool path.

    We have a new grandson and my daughter got something called the Owlet which is a PulseOximiter in a sock that communicates via Bluetooth LE to a base station that passes the data along on wi-fi. Naturally, I sniffed the LE part and found a bug for them in their advertising.

  4. #34
    Roger

    My Volvo works well with my iPhone via Bluetooth. I can see my contact list, incoming calls etc. on my car screen and I can make calls from the car screen but can't see my Google iPhone GPS on the screen. Is there a way to do this or is that a whole new system?
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  5. #35
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mike Null View Post
    Roger

    My Volvo works well with my iPhone via Bluetooth. I can see my contact list, incoming calls etc. on my car screen and I can make calls from the car screen but can't see my Google iPhone GPS on the screen. Is there a way to do this or is that a whole new system?
    Apple CarPlay unfortunately doesn't work with all applications...
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  6. #36
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    My wife in the passenger seat and my daughter in the backseat. They don't miss anything, even stuff that poses no danger to us whatsoever.
    Paul

  7. #37
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    Quote Originally Posted by paul cottingham View Post
    My wife in the passenger seat and my daughter in the backseat. They don't miss anything, even stuff that poses no danger to us whatsoever.
    Oh....I can relate to this.!!!
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  8. #38
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    There are Bluetooth profiles for the thing you describe as working. For instance, to see your phone book, the devices go through service discovery using SDP or Servise Discovery Profile. Then they open a channel over L2CAP. After some more fooling around, they open an Object Exchange session. The data they exchange is called PBAP or Phone Book Access Profile. Each of these steps has been carefully worked out.

    The he is no BT profile for exchanging your gps data from the controlling organization. That's where CarPlay and mirror link come in and why they are such a good idea. Like the one ring, these things just duplicate your phone screen on your car. You can do nything on your car that you can do on your phone.

    i don't know that much about these two systems. We don't sniff all the underlying protocols. But I like the idea.

    so, to answer your question, it's a whole different thing.

  9. #39
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    I love new technology on cars, my soon to be next car follows the car in front in a traffic jam with absolutely no input from the driver, stopping, starting & steering. Above a certain speed it then can self steer and has ACC which actually needs the driver to be aware of what is happening just as much as if he was controlling the speed himself. If the car is cruising at a set speed and comes up behind a slower car and the driver is not alert enough to pull out into another lane the car reduces speed which is the last thing you want. I think people hate this technology before they even get in a car and try it and can't understand why those same people will welcome new technology in phones etc. I welcome anything that makes driving easier, bring it on.
    Chris

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  10. #40
    Roger
    Thanks for the explanation.
    Mike Null

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  11. #41
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    Personally, because I can't see the rear of my car, I find it difficult to judge distance when backing up so my next car will have the rear camera feature & most likely only that (if it can be provide as only that without having to buy other options with it as a "package").
    Having said that I suspect that after all these opinions that the OP is probably more confused than ever. Frankly, I think the OP has already answered his own quection. If he can get only the blind spot monitoring which he wants & needs, and he's not comfortable with the $5,000 cost for extras that he doesn't want, then he shouldn't buy/pay for what he doesn't want.
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  12. #42
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    Chris, Which car is that? I have a friend with a Suburu that has ACC and he loves it. But self steering on the highway? Yikes!

    I am a fan of a world without human drivers. I'm 62 and would love a self-driving car. As I get old and infirm (and, frankly, dangerous), I see it as a way to move about the city for much longer. But, I am concerned about the transition period where cars will start to take over bits and pieces of the driving tasks. As we drivers have less and less to do, my fear is that we will become bored and complacent. My guess is that things will get worse before they get much better.

    That said, I really like your statement about, "above a certain speed". That strikes me as a very good compromise. If you are on I-70 driving across western Kansas, you are on auto-pilot. When you slow down going into Denver, you take over manual control. I would guess that, legally, you are still the driver of record and would be expected to remain at the wheel and vigilant. I think they are going through the same problems with airline pilots. The plane does so much of the flying now that it's hard for the pilot to remain alert.

    Until we get fully autonomous vehicles, I'm sort of a fan of what I call 'discrete backup'. That's where the safety systems augment the driver but don't overtly replace the driver. I have a Sawstop and I would characterize that safety system as discrete. I know it's there but I am still the operator of the saw and practice good safety. If I fail, the safety system kicks in and bails me out.

  13. #43
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    Roger, it is a Skoda Superb which is unavailable in the US but being a VW product is a close cousin to the Passat. It has what they call traffic jam assist for low speed control and ACC, lane assist and every other trick that VW has managed to cram into it for driving faster. I see there is a YT video of a driver asleep at the wheel of a Tesla which is driving itself, truly frightening and I think that the manufacturers may have to introduce something like the system on trains which requires input from the driver at pre-determined intervals. The Tesla company are leading the charge on this stuff and the rest of the world is madly trying to keep up. The Tesla will drop you at a destination and park itself with no input from anyone so I am told. I have seen a video again on YT of a Tesla self parking into a garage and closing the garage door! Awesome stuff.
    Chris

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