Thousands of car accidents occur every year in Sweden due to slippery road conditions. Globally, this number reaches incredibly high levels. To reduce the number of accidents, and to allow for future vehicles to have efficient systems for Advanced Driver Assistance, a car must be able to determine if a road is slippery or not.
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This winter, NIRA Dynamics has equipped a fleet of 80 vehicles with software for detecting road surface conditions in real-time. Road Surface Information (RSI) by NIRA continuously monitors the quality and tire grip level of the road surface – without stereo cameras, adaptive suspension or other expensive sensors. With sensor fusion based algorithms, RSI can determine the level of road roughness and road friction.
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By connecting RSI to a cloud service, road data can be distributed to other vehicles, enabling drivers to adapt their driving style or change routes as they receive information about upcoming hazards or dangerous situations. And that’s just one example – the possibilities are basically endless.
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To allow for a quick roll-out of this important safety feature, instead of only integrating the software as original equipment in brand new passenger cars, NIRA has in collaboration with Infocar Training AB integrated the friction software on Infocar´s electronic device that plugs into the standard interface in all passenger cars since model year 2001. This enables NIRA to start collecting and distributing this extremely dynamic information about the road condition in real-time, every second, and send it to a back-end server.
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This cloud data will then be possible to share with other drivers, road authorities and systems for Advanced Driver Assistance or for real time weather navigation data. Best of all, this dynamic data is available now.
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ABOUT NIRA: Founded in 2001 and headquartered in Sweden, NIRA Dynamics is at the forefront of sensor fusion, providing cost-efficient, value-adding services to the global vehicle industry. Customers include some of the world’s leading car manufacturers, such as Audi, Volkswagen, Seat, Skoda, Volvo, Fiat and Renault.
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ABOUT Infocar: Infocar Training is a developer and supplier of diagnostics equipment for vehicles, enabling the possibility to view parameters or doing data logging in real-time to a cloud server.
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