In most cases, driver monitoring systems use one or more infrared cameras on a car’s dashboard, steering wheel, or rearview mirror. Instead of streaming images to the cloud like a phone does, they use in-car software to process the images to track head, eye or hand movements. Their makers say the systems have been trained on millions of real and synthetic images of people behind the wheel and can determine whether a driver is looking at the road ahead or the phone in their lap.
Depending on the automaker, when the system detects that the driver is not paying attention while using an automated driving feature, it may issue a warning, change the color of the interior lights on the dashboard or steering wheel, sound an alarm, or make the steering wheel buzz , or some combination of all these strategies. If the driver doesn’t respond, the system triggers the car to slowly come to a stop.
Gabi Zijderveld, chief marketing officer of Smart Eye, a Swedish company that sells eye-tracking systems to auto suppliers, called driver monitoring in today’s cars “quite simple.” The company said its driver monitoring products are already in more than 1 million vehicles on the road and will be used in Volvo’s upcoming luxury electric Polestar 3. But in the future, cars equipped with driver monitoring systems may achieve even more nuanced feats, Zijderveld said.
Data from cars can be used to teach more complex algorithms to recognize when a person is safely scrolling through a car’s infotainment system while driving comfortably on a sunny four-lane highway, or risking fumbling with a playlist while driving down a city street in the snow. . In the latter case, the alarm may sound, flash or buzz, but not in the former.
When drivers try to multitask, researchers who study the psychology and mechanics of driving tend to rate their distractions based on whether their eyes return to the road often enough for long enough to re-establish awareness of them. Where cars and other people feel Vehicles, cyclists, and pedestrians are all in space. Driver monitoring systems may eventually be able to combine information from a car’s many sensors, for example, to determine that drivers are not paying enough attention when their vehicle is about to be T-backed, and to fasten their seat belts.
Drivers who are already on the wrong side of existing driver monitoring systems know their warnings and wails can be annoying, and they sometimes yell wolf. Automotive engineers must strike a delicate balance when choosing when and how a system beeps or beeps.
The key to building a great driver monitoring system, experts say, is creating software that not only tells drivers when they’re doing something wrong, but also supports their attention. “It’s about defensive driving and avoiding conflict altogether, not avoiding a crash once a conflict occurs,” said Greg Fitch, director of safety research for Google’s in-car app Android Auto. That could mean it emits a quiet but escalating tone rather than a high-pitched beep when it sees you looking aside — when you might be paying attention to a pedestrian. Maybe when you use the steering wheel to hug one side of the lane, the system doesn’t fully disengage from automatic lane keeping, but instead shares control.
