According to a recent ABC News story, self-driving vehicles have been tested on the streets of the Adelaide CBD in a bid to prove the potential for the technology to make Australian streets safer.
According to Adelaide-based Cohda Wireless —testing was done by connecting cars to other vehicles even they were not in line of sight.
As Cohda Wireless’s chief technical officer Paul Alexander says, “if the vehicles were connected using Cohda’s V2X (Vehicle-To-Everything) technology, a potential collision situation would be detected and avoided well in advance of it actually happening.”
“Cohda’s V2X technology allows vehicles to ‘speak to each other’ to extend their perception horizon. The technology provides the vehicle with an awareness of its environment and risk factors associated with it, consistently and accurately up to 10 times per second, enabling it to make decisions that a human being would not be capable of making as the driver of the vehicle.”
“Our goal today was not only to demonstrate the efficacy of our technology in enabling vehicles to communicate with each other but also to do so in a city environment where so-called ‘urban canyons’ significantly affect the ability of systems reliant on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) to achieve accurate positioning,” he says.
“The role of technology in making our roads safer is probably not generally understood but we hope that this demonstration has helped to prove that with the appropriate technology and infrastructure, connected self-driving vehicles deployed on our streets are at less risk than vehicles controlled by human beings.”
