Hyundai Mobis announced that the company has developed the world’s first Advanced Adaptive Driving Beam (AADB) which safely ensures vision with the high beams turned on all the time in connection with the Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS). Hyundai Mobis is planning to use this technology to lead the future car lamp market that requires precise light control.

The Adaptive Driving Beam (ADB) is a form of technology that helps the driver ensure vision by always maintaining high beam operation and preventing the glare on the driver of the car in front by blocking only the light of the high beams directed at the car in front at the same time.

The ADB is an essential technology for safe driving at night in the coming age of autonomous driving. The lamps of future cars are evolving in such a way as to finely control the light by precisely detecting vehicles and roads. Even during night driving, lanes, road signs and various objects on the road must be detected in real time, which is necessary for autonomous driving.

But the ADB is limited in properly responding to the rapid movement of other vehicles, such as vehicles overtaking from behind and vehicles making quick turns. Due to the technical problems of the current method—which uses cameras to detect the light in front and identify vehicles— all global automotive lamp makers are striving to solve this challenge.

Hyundai Mobis has reportedly approached this problem by increasing the types of information collected by the cameras and using the radar, the automotive navigation system and steering angle sensors to successfully develop the AADB.

The AADB collects information on lanes, in addition to detecting the light in front with the cameras, and assesses information on vehicles overtaking from blind spots, road information on expressways, national highways and curvature data on curves—which are obtained with the radar, the automotive navigation system, and the steering angle sensors, respectively. Hyundai Mobis claims to have developed it in just 18 months after it began the project early last year. It has also applied for 6 patents at home and 12 patents overseas.

Director of the company, Dr Mirco Goetz, in charge of lamp design at Hyundai Mobis, said, “As the performance of the existing Adaptive Driving Beam must be improved based on an understanding of various technologies, global lamp makers will have difficulty to narrow the technological gap in a short period of time.”

The company says that it has received orders for lamps totaling over $3.4 billion (Rs 24,937 crore ) since 2010, making it one of the top selling products of Hyundai Mobis. Last June, Hyundai Mobis developed the world’s first new material for headlamps that can solve the fog problem at source, and has since been accelerating the effort to secure affective quality. Also, the company is enhancing the performance of lamps by testing its new technologies on the world’s longest tunnel test track in the Seosan Proving Ground.

Also read: Hyundai Mobis and Tata Elxsi partner for autonomous driving R&D

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