HONDA

Company announces an experiment in which its cars are used to collect data about dangerous road conditions

With the help of GPS and on-board cameras, cars capture in real time information about incorrect markings or holes in the road, which will be forwarded to the competent authorities and services to correct the problems.

The Honda Research Institute's pilot project is the first to use connected vehicle technology to collect accurate data about road conditions. In doing so, Honda is partnering with the Ohio Department of Transportation and plans to begin providing data on road conditions in early 2022.

Accurate real-time road surface data from connected vehicles will help improve identification and remediation of potentially hazardous areas, said Paritosh Kelkar of the Honda Research Institute in the US, project manager for the road condition monitoring system.

Honda vehicles will visually subdivide the left and right lanes of the vehicle using four color codes. Green and yellow respectively indicate ideal or good lane marking conditions, while gray means no lanes, red means lane markings need to be repaired.

The Honda driver can be considered a more targeted version of connected vehicle technology, which has been talked about for many years but never materialized. For a long time, the automotive industry has promised vehicle-for-all (V2X) technology to improve traffic safety, allowing vehicles to interact with each other, as well as intelligent infrastructure such as traffic lights to better prevent accidents or other accidents.

Honda will also capture the coordinates with associated images and videos, which will be anonymous and uploaded to a “secure platform” for analysis. Road operators will have access to it, which will allow them to determine the location, type and severity of damage to the road surface, as well as receive photos and videos of the road section.

Some experts say the widespread adoption of the technology could help accelerate the adoption of autonomous cars, which can use vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) or vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication to increase their ability to “see” the environment and make better decisions while traveling.

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