VEHICLE SENSORS Tech giants join


Jonathan Newell examines the role of sensors in the race to gaining the upper hand in autonomous transport.


❱ ❱ The Lexus Platform 3.0 incorporates blended sensors into its coachwork design


❱ ❱ The Hyundai


Nexo is at home in the Nevada desert


T


he Consumer Electronic Show (CES) is held annually to showcase the latest glamorous consumer technology in the


appropriately glitzy Las Vegas. At last year’s event, the consumer technology press noted with some surprise that it was becoming less of a shop-window for tech-bling and computing equipment and more of an alternative motor show. With advances in infotainment,


connected motoring, electronic automotive content and vehicle autonomy, the car may have been a means of getting from A to B in the past, but it is now the single biggest investment in consumer electronics that people are likely to make. CES is therefore as important to the auto industry as other major motoring events and the race was on this year to be at the forefront of autonomy with all the automotive giants in attendance as well as suppliers of the associated enabling technology.


AT HOME IN NEVADA Hyundai is now in its third year of testing autonomous vehicles on public roads, having been granted a licence by the state of Nevada in 2015. Now, the Korean company is back in Las Vegas releasing its new Nexo model, which


2 /// DAQ, Sensors & Instrumentation Vol 1 No. 1


combines consumer-ready autonomous technology in the form of advanced assist systems, which provides control functions in place of the driver where required. There is still some way go before


Hyundai can market fully autonomous EAS level 4 autonomous vehicles, but the company is confident that it can do so by 2021 with the help of autonomous control specialist, Aurora, with whom the company has recently partnered. According to Hyundai, the fuel cell powered Nexo is in the right position in terms of consistent delivery of electrical energy to reliably power the sensors and autonomous control systems needed for full autonomy. “The fuel-cell powertrain will offer an ideal platform to implement autonomous driving technologies, which requires a massive amount of power to support the large amount of data communication as well as the operation of hardware such as sensors,” comments Dr Woong Chul Yang, Vice Chairman of Hyundai Motor.


BLENDING IN WITH THE CROWD Toyota has long been proven to be one of the prime movers from the automotive industry in driverless technology and the company has already arrived at the stage of refining the design of its vehicles to


blend in with other vehicles on the road rather than differentiating themselves with unattractive accoutrements such as protruding antennas, sensors and 360 degree camera pods. The result is “Lexus Platform 3.0”, a prototype vehicle that integrates automated vehicle technology with harmonised styling. The Toyota Research Institute (TRI) has been using the Lexus brand in the form of the LS 600 model for intensive driverless testing in Tokyo but CES in January was the first time the company revealed its latest platform with body-contoured sensor technology. The objectives of TRI were to improve the perception capabilities of the car, blend the sensing equipment into the vehicle design and package the technology in a way that could be manufactured in production volumes. According to TRI, Platform 3.0 has a


very sensor-rich package that makes it one of the most perceptive automated driving test cars on the road. The Luminar LiDAR system with 200-meter range, which had only tracked the forward direction on TRI’s previous test platform, now covers the vehicle’s complete 360-degree perimeter. This is enabled by four high-resolution LiDAR scanning heads, which precisely detect objects in the environment including notoriously difficult-to-see dark objects.


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