Originally Posted by
sggoodri
The sensing and processing technology need not weigh more than a few ounces using laser radar, IR pattern triangulation (think XBox Kinect) or stereo vision and purpose-built ASICS with embedded processor cores. I work with very small digital video cameras that perform computer vision on an embedded processor the size of my fingernail. Power consumption would be less than or equal to that consumed by a bike light, mostly for those solutions involving an active emitter; the imaging and processing would require only a couple of Watts. For instance, any of the triangulation based solutions could be implemented by leveraging the block matching components already built into the motion vector estimators of commercial video compression SOCs used in low power digital video cameras and IP cameras.
I agree that the main problem is deciding what to do with such information with so little time. By the time one knows that a collision is imminent, there might not be time for more than deploying an airbag, which may or may not be practical - airbags involve technologies I know much less about.
Thank you for pointing out some of the practical technical information.
As I recall, IR and acoustic currently don't really have the necessary range, at least not with what's reasonably affordable for something like this. The technology for laser ranging devices however is doable IMO (although I'm not 100% certain that you could have enough parallax for a direction). Honestly I think that image processing is where we'll eventually see this, combined with laser ranging or radar to provide scale. Given some sophistication you could determine an object's motion, even better if you had two or more video sources. The processing power is nearly there generally, if not already there with specialized processors.
This type of device could be put to good use (not simply an automated collision avoidance feature). We like mirrors after all, and mirrors at best show us what's approaching and just an idea of how fast. This device could do the same, but with more information having better precision and more consistently, and displayed (or otherwise interfaced) more conveniently. It just takes a little imagination.