Smart Headlights Will See Through the Rain

Dark and stormy nights: Excellent at setting the scene for a horror movie, but horrendous to drive through. While those wipers you should have replaced six months ago are furiously trying to keep up with the downpour, your headlights are not helping matters at all. Rather than lighting up the road they?re just illuminating the raindrops, making the already terrible visibility worse.

Smart headlights would shine through the drops, lighting up the road, not the rain. Srinivasa Narasimhan, an engineer at Carnegie Mellon University, thinks he?s come up with a way to do it. Narasimhan?s concept is still in the very early phases, but the idea behind the technology is simple.

To get rid of the distracting light show created when your high beams reflect off precipitation, you have to redirect the light away from the individual raindrops. Using a camera, a projector, and a computer algorithm, Narasimhan and his team have developed a concept headlight that can track individual droplets of rain. The camera detects the size, speed, and trajectory of raindrops. The computer uses the information to predict a raindrop?s path. The projector prevents light from shining where that raindrop is going to be.

It?s a bit like a spotlight following an actor across a stage, Narasimhan says. But the system has to work much faster?and it?s trying to keep its target in darkness, not light. In later versions of the technology, Narasimhan says, he and his team will explore whether to use an LED array or a projector to create the pattern.

Even in heavy rain or snow, Narasimhan says the technology should still be able to illuminate the roadway. "Unless it?s a waterfall or something that occupies the entire volume in front of the headlight, it should be okay," he says. The team can also build in a safety measure that would ensure that the light output never drops below a minimum level, even in the strongest downpour.

The next step is to make the whole process nimbler. Narasimhan says it can react in about 13 milliseconds; he wants to cut that down to just a few. It?s mostly a matter of making the transfer of data between the different components more efficient.

Mike Flannagan, a research professor at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute who studies driver vision, says raindrop reflection isn?t the most glaring problem of night driving?scientists are also trying to tackle issues such as reducing the glare from oncoming drivers who don?t remember to switch off their high beams. But, he says, the smart headlights project is a good example of the importance of headlight tech.

"People don?t really think too much about safety," Flannagan says, "but they are very concerned with being visually comfortable at night."

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/news/industry/smart-headlights-will-see-through-the-rain-10788905?src=rss

wmt human nature arkansas football howard johnson blackhawks real housewives of new jersey levon helm