Laser sensors for car safety

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About 1600 Australians die on the roads each year. That makes driving the most dangerous thing many of us do on a daily basis and usually, accidents are caused by human error - lapses in concentration or being overconfident in our own abilities.

But driving, in the not too distant future, is set to be a very different experience. Drivers will become passengers and crashing will be near impossible.

It's the age of autonomous driving: laser-guided cars with computers in control. It may be possible that you could drive more safely without your hands on the wheel.

Ulrich Lages is a German designer who has dedicated his life to developing the Ibeo Lynx laser-guided system for cars and trucks.

"This is not something on paper, this is something we have built prototypes of and you are going to start to see them very shortly," Ulrich said.

"In our sensor, we use a laser, a scanning laser, that detects all the objects all around the vehicle and then we understand what the other objects are doing, we understand what we are doing, and then we analyse the scenario in the case we detect an object which is on a collision course. We want to avoid this object by steering and or braking. It can even read pedestrian behaviour and take evasive action."

Don Grimm from Detroit is an engineer with General Motors Holden. It, too, has developed a system using wireless technology, similar to that found in many modern day devices such as phones and computers.

"It creates a safety bubble around your car, alerting you of any approaching vehicles or obstacles," Don said.

"It will even communicate with vehicles using the same system, making it impossible for them to come into contact. So at any one time, the system is constantly monitoring the environment around the driver. It's able to bring in information and if there is a situation the driver gets into could be threatening or hazardous, the system can proactively identify that situation, communicate it to the driver and the driver can take evasive action."

That's the first stage. If the driver then fails to react, the computer will take control, forcing evasive action, braking and steering you out of trouble.

"In a lot of the systems, we have demonstrated that the systems are capable of automatically controlling the vehicle to prevent the drivers from getting into dangerous situations," said Don.

If local governments install roadside units that communicate information about intersections such as a traffic signal phase, or if they install a device on the side of the road that would indicate a particular curve speed ahead, that information can be brought into the vehicle and drivers can get that safety information.

The wi-fi technology can also be used to reduce accidents at train crossings, and there is no need for boom gates.

So if you wanted to deploy this type of technology on the locomotive itself, or somewhere along the infrastructure, you can have the ability to give drivers advisory information as they approach the railway crossings - give them the information that they can act on, and further down the road, even assume control if you know the vehicle is going to collide with the train crossing area.

This may all seem like pie in the sky stuff with cars thinking for themselves and being in control, but it's very much a reality with all major car manufacturers on board. In fact, the first autonomous systems will be on our roads within four years.

Once we introduce some level of automatice vehicle control, we will start to chip away at a lot of these different types of crashes and once you address crash by crash, you are getting closer and closer to vehicles that don't crash.

Just a 10 per cent reduction in accidents Australia-wide would save lives and reduce the cost to the community by 170 million dollars a year.

The added cost to include this technology in a new car? Less than $200.

The only ones not smiling are the local panel repairers.