► Up close with Harman’s new ReadyAware technology
► Car-to-X awareness without the need for infrastructure
► Tech can be integrated into existing and new connected cars
Harman, the wholly owned subsidiary of Samsung, seems to have solved one of the biggest problems with car-to-X technology – the need for expensive hardware – with its ReadyAware system.
ReadyAware is just one of the projects under Harman’s ‘Ready’ umbrella of technology developments, which is designed to give the modern connected car much more situational awareness of what’s ahead of it or what’s on route. This comes in the shape of alerts and messages given to the driver via the car’s infotainment and instrument displays.
Most of those behaviours sound quite familiar if you use something like Waze – the mapping software that also alerts you of traffic, broken down cars or roadworks ahead. But ReadyAware also includes alerts like (the unlikely event of) a wrong way driver, bad weather affecting road conditions or even something more instantaneous like someone applying their brakes very hard or reversing ahead of you.
It’s the kind of use case that’s perhaps the most beneficial from the whole subject area of car-to-X technology: where your car would communicate and pool information with other cars or infrastructure in the vicinity like traffic lights or dot matrix gantry signs. Instead of requiring additional or specific hardware that requires a car to communicate with civil infrastructure or other cars from different brands, Harman claims ReadyAware can be installed into a modern car’s in-built systems and use the suite of sensors and cameras already at the car’s disposal.
However, unlike a conventional map service with driver alerts (like Waze), the driver wouldn’t need to report that information themselves. ReadyAware uses the car’s already-installed sensors and cameras – as well as driving inputs like steering or brake inputs, or whether the traction control has to intervene – to log potential alerts to other drivers entirely via Harman’s ‘Situational Awareness Engine’ (SAE) that’s housed entirely in the cloud. All a car would need is a 4G or 5G connection and enough processing power to run the ReadyAware technology – two criteria that are both largely commonplace in new, connected cars.
‘If a vehicle has to talk to another vehicle, or talk to infrastructure, it’s usually always hardware dependent,’ says Hanieffa Mohamed, project manager for the ReadyAware technology. ‘What we’re doing here is 100 per cent software.
‘There are already loads of control modules in cars, so we can install this software in two control modules – the domain control unit [DCU, used to process data and make decisions when using automated driving systems] as well as the head unit [for the infotainment.’ Mohamed says the tech can be integrated into an Android or Linux-based operating system and can help car companies score that seductive five-star EuroNCAP rating.
The SAE analyses driver data and will build a ‘confidence score’ with the information. That score will rise if other drivers react to the same event and a pattern is found in the corroborating data, leading to ReadyAware making drivers further down the road, er… aware.
The Ready suite of products is designed to be an off-the-shelf bundle of hardware and/or software that car makers can install into their future cars. The idea is that Harman effectively takes almost all of the time and cost out of software development – a part of building a new car that is taking up more and more of both.
In fact, Harman already claims to have 50 million vehicles on the road today with either its audio technology (like its Harman/Kardon premium systems) or connected car tech equipped. And, even if it’s not Harman technology, it’s a rarity these days that a car isn’t in some way ‘connected’ to the wider world. Which is the case Harman is arguing as to why car makers should work with it, rather than create their own versions.
As for when it’ll actually hit the market, we’re not entirely sure. Harman says the technology is ready now but, given it will need to work with OEMs and install it in future cars, that could still be a few years away.