GM, wi-fi, smartphones and pedestrians
We’ve made it a bit of our unspecified mission to talk a lot about car and driving safety on this blog of our, and today’s story is about a new safety technology being developed by General Motors.
GM is working on a new driver assistance technology meant to protect pedestrians, cyclists and other on-foot road users with the help of their smartphones.
This pedestrian detection technology uses Wi-Fi Direct, the technology which allows mobile phones and smartphones to talk to each other without needing a common access point, like a phone tower.
The technology allows the sharing of information from up to two hundred meters in more or less one second, and the GM technology feature sends signals back and forth to the various gadgets in order to warn drivers of their presence.
Global GM R&D director of the electrical and control systems research lab said that this wireless pedestrian protection technology was the next step in the ongoing project of developing vehicle-to-infrastructure and vehicle-to-vehicle communication systems.
The idea behind this type of system is to potentially warn drivers about pedestrians who could be appearing onto the road surface without being seen, for instance from behind a parked vehicle, or bicyclists who are riding in your blind spot.
The company is considering including this technology as part of their standard safety package in future models, in its goal to reduce the road toll of United States pedestrians.
Of course this would only be one application of the technology, it is considered that a vehicle with this type of technology will be more than capable of receiving files, music and any other sort of digital media.
