How
Fast Humans React to Road Hazards
Probably over
400,000 Tesla were sold worldwide. But the majority of the owners are probably
still driving the cars themselves more than ninety percent of the time. Why do
we need autonomous vehicles if it is working more like a connected Electric
Vehicle? Safety. Consumers are more interested in safety than making cars
driverless. When a child runs onto the road, it takes an average of 1.6 seconds
for a human driver to hit the brakes. Autonomous vehicles equipped with
radar or lidar sensors and a camera system have a reaction time of 0.5
seconds. The machine is faster than humans.
A new study by MIT researchers shows humans need about 390 to 600 milliseconds to detect and react to road hazards, given only a single glance at the road . The results indicate that younger drivers are quicker at both tasks: Older drivers (55 to 69 years old) required 403 milliseconds to detect hazards in videos, and 605 milliseconds to choose how they would avoid the hazard. Younger drivers (20 to 25 years old) only needed 220 milliseconds to detect and 388 milliseconds to choose from. Reaction time is also a critical factor when the drivers are tired. Autonomous vehicles ensure drivers will have enough time to safely take the controls and steer clear of unexpected hazards.
Why 5G is Crucial For Safety
What does 5G have to do with self-driving
cars? 5G’s increased throughput, reliability,
availability, and lower latency will enable new safety-sensitive applications
which are holistically known as V2X or Vehicle-to-Everything. The low latency
is important for real-time decision-making scenarios. Autonomous cars generate terabytes of data
daily. Anything over a hundred milliseconds of latency is going to disrupt the
operation of autonomous vehicles.
5G specifies one millisecond (ms) end-to-end transmission
latency requirements which are perfect for minimizing the V2X communications
reaction time. With the existing 4G LTE system, it has various limitations
preventing 1ms end-to-end transmission such as the 1ms length of subframes. As
a result, 4G LTE will exceed the 1ms end-to-end transmission requirement just
to transmit the data. The bandwidth
improvements with 5G will improve the data transfer rate. 5G’s high bandwidth data rate of up to 20 Gb/s enables
applications like real-time mapping for automated driving, software updates,
and streaming multimedia infotainment. In addition, 5G improves network
reliability by limiting packet loss which is important for safety-critical V2X
services such as collision avoidance and safety systems (V2V), traffic signal
timing/priority (V2I), real-time traffic/routing and cloud services (V2N), and
safety alerts to pedestrians/bicyclists (V2P).
5G encompasses a host of evolving technologies like new cellular antenna and modems, small cells, carrier aggregation (which enables radios to tune to overlapping channels simultaneously), Massive MIMO (which coordinate tens of antennas at a time), and QAM (which packs additional data signals into radio waves). Moreover, there’s not just one “type” of 5G. Millimeter-wave — often abbreviated “mm-Wave” — are ultra-high-frequency radio waves in the 24GHz to 300GHz range that reliably transmit lots of information over relatively short distances (around 1,000 feet). They’re separate and distinct from sub-6Hz or 600Mhz and 2.5GHz, which can travel further than mm-Wave but offer only a fraction of the bandwidth.
It will take time for
the 5G infrastructure to build up. When 5G is adopted widely it will offer much
better safety protection for consumers.
References
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