Yahoo News Cars That Can Hear Sirens Are Coming
Cars are increasingly laden with cameras, radar, lidar, and sensors that help them see, process, and react. A new technology being developed by auto supplier ZF will soon make them able to hear, too. What started as an idea from two ZF employees has become a prototype with some serious potential.
Using two waterproof microphones, positioned in the front and rear of the car, the system uses artificial intelligence to process ambient sounds and will notify the driver if it detects an emergency vehicle in the area such as an ambulance, fire, or police vehicle.
It's immediately clear how useful such a warning could be for the hearing impaired, who currently have to count on seeing a vehicle with flashing lights, but it is equally promising for situations where someone might have the music cranked up or be otherwise distracted. ZF engineers say that, for now, the car just sends the driver a visual notification, but that eventually an autonomously driven car could react by slowing down or pulling to the side, depending on surrounding traffic and as local legislation requires.
We rode along on a closed test track near ZF's headquarters in Friedrichshafen, Germany, to see how the prototype works. At the moment, it's attuned to the sounds that German emergency vehicles make. While we were riding along, an ambulance approached from the rear as part of the demonstration. A notification appeared on a dedicated screen indicating that an emergency vehicle was nearby; in production, it could be integrated into the car's own infotainment systems. When the ambulance approached in the opposite direction of traffic on a divided highway, the indication noted that-to make the driver aware, but also to differentiate that circumstance from a situation where it would be necessary to pull over or slow down.
The two ZF employees, Florian Ade and Julian Fieres, pitched the idea at the company's first innovation challenge last year, and they have been overseeing its development. They told us that initially the technology, which they've named Sound.ai, can help strictly for emergency-vehicle detection, but eventually they think that the auditory components' duties could quickly be adapted for other purposes that they did not want to elaborate on yet. We imagine there'd be some value in an autonomous car that could hear and react to other sounds, or even people speaking outside such as law-enforcement officers directing traffic, parking attendants, and pedestrians.
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