Nissan Exhibits for CEATEC Japan 2008
Dubai - United Arab Emirates What better way to advance the development of crash prevention technology than to mimic some of the best proponents of collision avoidance in the natural world? Bees.
In a surprising project that will be unveiled at CEATEC, the humble bumblebee has given engineers at Nissan Motor Co.'s Advanced Technical Center a strategic hint at how to design the next generation of crash avoidance systems.
Co-developed with the Center for Advanced Science and Technology Research at Japan's prestigious Tokyo University, Nissan has built the Bio-mimetic Car Robot Drive, or BR23C, a robotic micro-car that recreates bee characteristics with the end goal of producing a system that prevents collisions altogether.
Described by Kazuhiro Doi, general manager, Technology PR and R&D Brand Management, as a further extension of Nissan's four-layered Safety Shield, the BR23C robotic car aims at enhancing the inner-most layer of that shield, and in so doing, reinforce the company's collision avoidance capability.
"In flight, each bee creates its own oval-shaped personal space which in fact closely resembles our own Safety Shield," said Doi.
But more crucially, it is the bee's compound eyes, capable of seeing over 300-degrees in all directions that allows the bumblebee to fly uninterrupted inside its own personal space.
In order to recreate the function of a compound eye, engineers came up with the idea of a Laser Range Finder.
The LRF detects obstacles up to two meters away within a 180-degree radius in front of the BR23C, calculates the distance to them, and sends a signal to an on-board microprocessor, which is instantly translated into collision avoidance.
"The split second it detects an obstacle, the car robot will mimic the movements of a bee and instantly change direction by turning its wheels at right angles or greater to avoid a collision.
The biggest difference to any current system is that the avoidance maneuver is totally instinctive.
If that was not so, then the car robot would not be able to react fast enough to avoid obstacles," explained Toshiyuki Andoh, Manager of the Mobility Laboratory and principal engineer of the car robot project.
"It must react instinctively and instantly because this technology corresponds to the most vulnerable and inner-most layer of our Safety Shield, a layer in which a crash is currently considered unavoidable.
The whole process must mirror what a bee does to avoid other bees. It must happen within the blink of an eye."
But unlike a bee, it cannot deviate upwards or downwards or diagonally, only in two dimensions and only in the direction that the wheels can turn.
"So in place of the infinite number of ways a bumblebee can avoid other bees, we have employed a rotation function, in addition to acceleration and deceleration as our car robot's means of collision avoidance," added Andoh.
The BR23C uses lithium polymer batteries, which are lighter and have higher energy density, meaning that they last longer than the lithium-ion variety. Andoh tells us that its instincts are intelligent, not its ability to process or even store data.
"This device only needs to process inputs every few seconds, and act on that. It does not need to retain any memory or intuitive logic from previous maneuvers, so it can operate continuously using as little as a couple of dozen KBs of memory. This might surprise you but we are not talking about GBs or even MBs or memory here."
This is the first step in developing instantaneous collision avoidance technology, which Nissan anticipates will find its way into production cars within ten years.
One other possible future application could be to integrate the unit with a GPS sat-nav system so that it leads a driver to a destination, avoiding obstacles along the way.
Joint research between Nissan and Tokyo University might have only just begun with the bio-mimetic car robot, but this bee-inspired technology has taken the next big step in creating technologies that will one day lead to a collision-free future.
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For more information, please contact:
Hakam Kherallah
Senior Manager
Corporate Communications Department
Tel: +971 4 881 7500
Fax: +971 4 881 9747
E-mail: hakam@nissan-me.ae
Vivian Hawat
TBWA/RAAD Middle East
Tel: + 971 4 425 8800 ext. 8976
E-mail: vivian.hawat@tbwaraad.com
© Press Release 2008
