| Lexus—and parent company Toyota—has unveiled the Advanced Active Safety Research Vehicle it previewed last week at the 2013 CES show in Las Vegas, and it's one big automated kahuna. Even though the cyborg Lexus is capable of autonomous driver-free motoring, Toyota and Lexus insist that a driverless vehicle isn't "necessarily" the project's goal. Instead, the AASRV, which is based on a Lexus LS sedan, is being billed as a rolling test bed for active safety technologies Toyota's working on. The AASRV represents Toyota's Integrated Safety Management Concept, which focuses on five key areas of motoring: car startup and drive-off; active safety systems to help avoid crashes; pre-crash systems designed to prepare for a collision; passive safety to help occupants survive a crash; and post-crash rescue and response. Based on Toyota's account of the AASRV's capabilities, it looks like the robot sedan focuses heavily on the active safety aspect of the company's Safety Management Concept. The big four-door is equipped with GPS, stereoscopic cameras, radar, and Radar Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) laser tracking that help it motor along on its own. The most visible component is the roof-mounted LIDAR tower, which looks similar to the setup atop Google's autonomous cars and which gives the AASRV a 360-degree view of its surroundings—so long as said surroundings are within 70 meters or so of the car. Three high-definition color cameras keep track of things in front of and on each side of the vehicle up to 150 meters, including traffic lights, which they can "read." Front and side radar systems further enhance the AASRV's awareness, and GPS location helps the car place itself in the world. Lexus and Toyota have yet to elaborate on what specific future roadgoing tech the AASRV previews, but most of today's safety efforts involve heightened levels of vehicle automation before or even during a collision. A car that can do things on its own certainly moves the ball towards the basket in this regard.
Toyota and Lexus also are getting in on the car-to-car communication action, a game that at present, is most visibly being pursued by Volvo with its road-train experiments. Toyota has set up a large facility in Japan to conduct research into talkative cars, and to see how cars that know where other cars are can avoid crashing into one another. For now, all of these concepts remain just that, although Lexus and myriad other automakers (such as Mercedes) currently offer several semi-autonomous features, including adaptive cruise control, lane-keeping assist, and a pre-collision system designed to mitigate or avoid certain crashes with other cars or pedestrians.  from Car and Driver Blog http://blog.caranddriver.com | |||
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