Laying the foundation for autonomous driving: Honda's safety super sense and intelligent navigation interconnection

With the launch of Tesla's autonomous driving, we can see that this technology is not far away from us. Honda also used this year's media conference to showcase two new technologies that lay the foundation for its autonomous driving - Safety Super Sense and Intelligent Navigation. Soon these two technologies will be applied to Honda's mid-range and above models launched in 2016.

The annual Honda Media Conference was held again. As in the past, the media conference still carried the slogan of FUNTEC. This time, two new technologies were released to lay the foundation for future autonomous driving. These two technologies are Honda SENSING, a safety super-sensing system based on driving assistance, and Honda CONNECT, an intelligent interconnection system related to navigation and car networking. Please see the detailed explanation below for the specific new functions of these two technologies.

Safety super-sensing system

The Super Sense safety system is a comprehensive driving assistance system designed and developed by Honda for future autonomous driving. In addition to the auxiliary functions such as blind spot display, blind spot monitoring, and wide-angle camera of rearview mirrors that have been applied to mass-produced models, it has added several new functions such as collision mitigation braking, lane deviation suppression, active cruise with low-speed following mode, and lane keeping. Through the radar system of the vehicle's front grille and the monocular camera in the front window, this system can effectively identify pedestrians and vehicles in front of it, improving the vehicle's perception of the outside world. In addition, the system also has a certain comprehensive information processing function. According to external factors, driver operation status, vehicle condition and other information, it actively participates in the vehicle's braking, steering, speed maintenance, etc., so as to avoid and reduce the occurrence and damage of man-made accidents. In order to let everyone have a more intuitive understanding of what functions Honda's safety super sense system includes, we use pictures to show you.

Lane Keeping Assist (coming soon)

The system uses a single-lens camera to monitor and identify the lane (10cm wide) and assists in steering operations to keep the vehicle in the middle of the lane. When the system finds that the vehicle has deviated from the lane, it will vibrate the steering wheel to remind the driver to operate.

Collision Mitigation Braking System (coming soon)

This system uses the radar waves and monocular camera at the front of the vehicle to sense the vehicles in front and on the opposite side. Its recognition range is within 120m. Since pedestrians are relatively small in size relative to vehicles, its recognition of pedestrians can only be enabled within a range of 50m, while infants or small animals that are too small are not within the recognition range. When the system detects a possible collision, it will first warn the driver to take measures through a warning sound and dashboard display. When the vehicle gets closer to the person or vehicle in front, if the driver does not respond, the system will further apply slight braking to remind him, which is the biggest difference from other car manufacturers that directly stop by braking. If the driver still does not take action at the end, the system will apply strong braking to avoid or reduce collision damage.

Lane Departure Mitigation (coming soon)

As an extension of lane keeping, this system still uses a monocular camera to detect the lanes on both sides. When the vehicle deviates from the lane, the system first reminds the driver through the vibration of the steering wheel and the display of the instrument panel, and also actively operates the steering wheel to drive the vehicle back to the lane. If the vehicle deviates at a large angle without changing lanes while driving, the system will take braking measures to prevent the vehicle from deviating from the lane.

Adaptive cruise control with low-speed follow mode (coming soon)

This function can also be seen as a traffic jam assistance function to a certain extent. It uses radar waves and a single-lens camera to sense and identify the distance and speed difference between the vehicle and the vehicle in front, and automatically adjusts the vehicle speed to maintain a certain safe distance from the vehicle in front. The newly added low-speed following mode can automatically follow the vehicle in front until it stops, and restart after the vehicle in front continues to drive. Since the safe distance for following the vehicle is as large as 3m, it is more suitable for use on highways rather than in urban areas.

Blind spot monitoring (already applied)

When the vehicle is driving and there is another vehicle behind it, the system will automatically light up the blind spot monitoring indicator light in that direction to remind the driver. If the driver turns on the direction signal light, the indicator on the exterior rearview mirror will flash and be accompanied by a warning sound to remind the driver to pay attention to the vehicle condition.

Rear-view wide-angle camera (already applied)

The wide-angle camera at the rear of the vehicle provides a 180-degree wide-angle field of view. When reversing, the wide-angle mode can confirm vehicles, pedestrians and markings approaching from the left and right directions to assist in reversing into a parking space.

Blind spot display (already applied)

The camera installed in the right rearview mirror allows the driver to observe vehicles in the blind spot through the display screen inside the car. This function increases the field of view of the right rearview mirror from 20 degrees to 80 degrees, helping to expand the field of view and reduce the blind spot of the rearview mirror.

Intelligent interconnection system

The second technology, Intelligent Navigation Interconnection, can be said to be a further upgrade of the navigation interconnection system. In addition to cooperating with Alibaba AutoNavi Group to provide localized services, it also has strong expansion capabilities. Based on the original technology and foundation, this system consists of a navigation display screen and an on-board communication unit. It is connected to the cloud through network communication to provide various forms of navigation services, weather, online news, violation query and other information services, as well as emergency call functions. Honda said that this system will provide customers with 10 years of free service (including basic navigation, communication fees and emergency calls). Based on the powerful functions of the Internet of Vehicles, it will be possible to provide remote vehicle diagnostic functions, appointment repair shops and other extended functions in the future, and the Internet of Vehicles will also keep people, cars and traffic hardware facilities connected, becoming the basic technology for autonomous driving in the future. Below, we still use a chart to intuitively show its specific functions.

Navigation Services

Ordinary navigation with built-in map in the car

The communication function of the navigation system can update the latest data at any time, predict the arrival time of the destination, retrieve the real-time traffic conditions, notify disasters, send the destination from the mobile phone to the car computer, and combine the mobile phone APP to navigate from the parking lot to the destination

Information Services

Online news with voice broadcast function, online weather with shared information and location, traffic violation query

Emergency call

Contact the police, ambulance via the call center

other service

Online music, online radio, etc.

The two latest FUNTEC technologies released by Honda will be gradually installed and applied in mid-range and above models as options. Among them, the super-sense safety technology will first be applied to the new generation Elysion (to be launched early next year), the tenth-generation Civic (to be launched in the spring of next year) and the mid-term facelift model of Accord (to be launched next year); the intelligent navigation interconnection technology will first be applied to the mid-term facelift model of Lingpai (to be launched this year), the tenth-generation Civic (to be launched in the spring of next year) and the mid-term facelift model of Accord (to be launched next year). In the future, Honda will gradually bring more and more FUNTEC new technologies to Chinese consumers through its products.