Skip to main content

Brake lights sensitive to braking force

Almost every time I sit in the co-driver's seat in a car, I get a feeling of fear and claustrophobia whehever the car at the front starts braking. I feel like the car in front may be braking more abruptly than the car I am sitting in. Hence, I squinch expecting a crash, which gladly has not happened yet.
The red braking ligths are scary. While their purpose is to inform the drivers behind that the car is braking, it fails at telling how much it is braking. Because one can't know for sure if the car is braking abruptly or just sligthy, the back driver may push the braking pedal stronger or with less force than needed, causing a car crash.
Hence, I have thougth of a solution: force sensitive braking lights. The idea is that the light is brigther when the braking force is larger and weaker when the braking force is smaller. However, it cannot be made just that simple. For the back driver to know how much the front car is braking, two characteristics are required: the current braking force and the maximum braking force.
The design problem is how to inform the back driver of the maximum braking force of the front car, in order to give him some context of how much is the front car trully braking.
The solution is simple: Imagine a circular light, whose edge is illuminated (preferrably not with red, as it may confuse drivers not familiar with the system). Now when the driver begins to brake, the central part of the ligth gets illuminated. As the braking force increases, the ligth expands to fill the whole light. This image will make it earier to understand:

Forcesensitivebrakingligths
The dotted light in the first case is a symbolic representation of the size of the light. Once the braking pedal is pressed, a blue glow shows around the light to show the maximum braking capacity of the car. The braking is initially weak, so braking light (shown in red) is weak/small. Then as the braking force increases also the breaking light brigthens/increases in size. When the braking pedal is pressed to its maximum the whole braking ligth becomes red, hence the ligth is very strong. When the driver releases the pedal, the red ligth as well as the blue glow dissapears.
With such a system in place, the back driver will know how much the front driver is braking and be able to react appropriately. 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Basic cell counting and segmentation in Matlab

Counting cells manually is a tedious error prone process for humans. Given a large data set of microscopy images this task can be achieved much faster by means of basic computer vision techniques. In this tutorial we will segment cells from an image following a method similar to the one presented by Yongming Chen in 1999. The method uses basic morphological operations  and the watershed algorithm to segment the cells. Nowadays better methods for cell segmentation exist. This method was chosen for its simplicity and ease of implementation. We start with an image of cell-like structures by Anna-Katerina Hadjantonakis and Virginia E Papaioannou . A = imread('cells.jpg'); We convert the image to grayscale: I = rgb2gray(A); To be able to extract the dimmer cells, it is necessary to perform some local contrast adjustments I = adapthisteq(I); Objects on the borders can be caused by noise and other artifacts. We can eliminate objects on the borders...
1 comment
Read more

The Increased Addictiveness of Today's Video Games

This is a guest post by Miles Walker, a freelance writer and blogger who usually  compares car insurance  deals over at CarinsuranceComparison.Org. His most recent review looked at the best  car insurance quotes . Video games have always held some addiction, but now more than ever that addiction is growing. People are spending more time than ever playing the games, and game designers are constantly finding new ways keep it that way. Their efforts have a been a complete success, and some games have true addicts, addicts who play 24 hours a week or more. Visual enhancements Video games have come a long way since a certain duo of Italian plumbers started showing up in people's houses in the late 1980s. By leaps and bounds, video game graphics have become alarmingly sophisticated. Each graphical improvement increased a game's possibilities and added more depth to video games. Designers began thriving on this depth, making games with more achievements, unlocks, lev...
19 comments
Read more

A more confusing Internet with .brand TLDs

A few months ago, I wrote a post proposing to remove top level domains from the internet, as many people don't understand why we need TLDs. At the time I didn't know either. Removing TLDs would simplify browsing an possibly increase security by reducing phishing sites that make use of URL similarity to gain visits to potentially dangerous websites, or sites filled with ads. The ICANN, the body that manages Internet names, has for years been preparing something different but that produces a slightly similar effect than removing TLDs: allowing brands to register their own TLDs . The proposal may soon be approved has been approved . Brands would therefore be able to register their own TLDs. Google could register .google a potentially powerful TLD for their services, like Google Maps: maps.google instead of maps.google.com. Brand TLD don't improve short urls like google.com, but seem to be effective for use in subdomains. Registering a .<brand-name> TLD will cost...
1 comment
Read more