From Safety Assistance To Visionary, Safety-Enhancing Mobility Concepts

Personal mobility of the future will be based on a combination of different transport modes, with autonomous vehicles playing a key role. Continental is engaged in development work on all forms of automated driving with the aim of proposing, developing and ultimately also industrialising its solutions.

DRIVING A VEHICLE

When driving a vehicle, the driver assumes the traditional functions of a system controller, adjusting acceleration, steering and braking – and, depending on the vehicle, also clutch control and gear-changing – to the prevailing traffic conditions and regulations. When carrying out this human version of “motion control,” drivers use their sensory perception, acquired knowledge and past experience to deduce the necessary actions. This whole process works astonishingly well in everyday driving, even in quite complex environments.

This is partly due to the existence of basic traffic rules and regulations, which are universally accepted by all road users, and partly due to the human driver’s ability to generate a personal environment model – and within this model to filter out non-relevant information – from a large number of sometimes very subtle visual cues. To give one example: braking vehicles in front of the subject vehicle may be perceived very differently by the driver in different situations. If only one vehicle is braking, this initially gives little indication as to the actual degree of deceleration and level of risk. If, on the other hand, several vehicles are braking simultaneously, the human driver is intuitively prompted to brake harder. In many situations, drivers can also use eye contact with other road users as a subtle means of communication.