The Web Scene » Car

Car Horns Warn Against Natural Disasters

sparky3887 — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 12:13:44 +0000

German researchers want to use the infrastructure of a new European Union emergency system called eCall to complement the national satellite-based warning system SatWaS. Individuals currently can only receive a warning of a natural disaster via SatWaS if a radio or TV is turned on, but Germany could use eCall to trigger car horns and provide more extensive alarming. Designed to reduce car accidents, eCall features a global positioning system sensor and a mobile phone component, which is activated only in an accident and can transmit data, such as time of the accident, coordinates, and driving direction of the vehicle, to an emergency call center. A team from the Fraunhofer Institute for Technological Trend Analysis INT in Euskirchen wants to equip cars with radio receivers so that civil protection agencies would be able to send a message to cars, within certain boundaries and with engines off, to sound their horns. ECall will be rolled out in new cars starting in September 2010. “If all new vehicles are equipped with eCall from the end of next year, the warning system may be ready for use after an establishment phase of two to four years,” says Guido Huppertz from the INT’s Technology Analyses and Forecasts department.

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Techies the Latest Weapon in Catching Car Thieves

sparky3887 — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 02:31:40 +0000

Researchers at the University of Technology, Sydney, (UTS) Australia, have developed software that uses new imaging technology to enable moving police cars to automatically detect stolen cars in traffic. The new imaging techniques, which are based on hexagonal pixels instead of the traditional square pixels, allow a computer connected to a camera to accurately identify and read license plate numbers in real time. Geoff Hughes at Australia’s National Motor Vehicle Theft Reduction Council says the technology could be placed in fixed speeding cameras, which often cannot differentiate between plates from different states. The technology is based on the development of spiral architecture, a data structure in which images are represented as collections of hexagonal pixels. UTS professor Xiangjian He says hexagonal pixels create images with smoother edges than square pixels, and can provide pictures of equal quality using 13 percent fewer pixels. “It’s not a new idea, but what our team has done is use hexagonal pixels to develop much better methods of curve detection than is possible with square pixels, and this has opened the way for much quicker and more accurate shape identification,” He says. Outside of law enforcement, the technology could improve digital cameras and object recognition capabilities in robots.

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Embedded Electronics–Cars Get Cooperative

sparky3887 — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 20:03:56 +0000

The European EMMA project has developed a new middleware platform for embedded sensors called EM2P that acts as an interface between designers and the electronics. The project’s researchers say that EM2P could lead to thousands of new applications in a variety of industries, starting with in-car electronics. Embedded sensor systems are often designed for a single task, but that functionality, such as detecting a sudden deceleration, could be used for a variety of other purposes and used with other sensors to create new applications. “We sought to hide the underlying complexity of in-car embedded sensors so that developers could quickly design new applications with existing electronics,” says EMMA coordinator Antonio Marques Moreno. “EMMA will foster cost-efficient ambient intelligence systems with optimal performance, high reliability, reduced time-to-market, and faster deployment.” Project participants hope that hiding the complexity of the infrastructure will open up interfaces to third parties. The EMMA project focused on transportation to test its system, since vehicles offer numerous opportunities to enhance road safety, such as creating communication channels between sensors within a car and other cars or street signs. Marques says one of EM2P’s major strengths is scalability, since it has been designed to be able to work with an entire city’s vehicle population.

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