Self-braking cars will save thousands of lives October 8, 2012
How effective are systems that warn a driver about an impending
front collision, then slam on the brakes if the driver doesn’t
act quickly enough? A lot, says a paper recently published in
IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, IEEE
Spectrum Tech Talk reports. Researchers at Virginia Tech’s
Center for Injury Biomechanics studied systems that rely on
radar to tell the car when it is coming dangerously close to
another vehicle’s rear bumper. Some of these systems deliver an
audible warning when the distance between the car and the one
ahead of it gets too narrow. Others offer braking assistance if
the driver responds to the warning by applying the brakes. Still
another type attempts to bring the car to a halt with a huge
braking force if the driver has not hit the brake pedal 0.45
seconds before the sensors predict that there will be contact.
Based on a U.S. Department of Transportation crash data, they
concluded that in most cases