Car Designers Remake the Steering Wheel for the Age of Autonomy
Released on 01/18/2017
As we move towards a future of autonomous vehicles
one problem that automakers and car parts suppliers
are grappling with is what to do
when the car's computer needs the human
to take control again
and how to know what the human is up to.
This is one answer to that.
This is the zForce steering wheel from Autoliv.
And if you can see here around the edge
it's got this series of LED's embedded into the wheel
and as I move the wheel around
or move my hand around the wheel you can see
the blue lights chasing me around.
That's done because there's a whole series
of little infra red sensors all the way around
so the car knows when my hands are on the wheel.
When I'm gripping it I'm in control, the lights are blue.
If I take my hands off the wheel
and autonomous driving is available
in whatever vehicle this would be installed into,
and this is just a concept--
[Car Computer] Auto drive activated.
Then those lights would go green
to show autonomous mode is available
and they can also go other colors, orange, red.
[Car Computer] Warning driver attention required.
[Jack] To try and get the driver's attention
in a much better way than just a little icon.
[Car Computer] Auto drive deactivated.
In front of you in the dash which is pretty easy to miss.
Quite clever though.
Having these means that there's a better
line of communication between the car and the driver
and you can use them in other ways.
For example if I was to get an incoming phones call,
I'm just gonna start that on the demo here.
(phones ringing) And my hands
are on the wheel, instead of blue
under this thumb over here I've got
little green and little red LEDs.
So I can press green to answer the call there
and then red to end it and then we're back to blue
and I'm in control of driving again.
So this is just one solution but it's
an interesting way of looking at how
to start grappling with the problem
of communicating not just what the car's
doing to the driver but what the driver's doing to the car.
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