Driver Safety with ADAS and Level 3+ Autonomy with Scania

Scania is at the forefront of autonomous transport system development. Whether the system is human-driven or autonomous, the safety of drivers, passengers and other road users is the number one priority for Scania.

Currently, the role of human driver is changing thanks to the progress in advanced driver assistance systems and self-driving capabilities. This opens new opportunities for example in driver and passenger comfort but also introduces new considerations in ensuring the safety of transportation.

With constantly developing ADAS and self-driving capabilities, the drivers can do non-driving tasks while at the wheel, on condition that nothing prevents them from taking over again in a demanding situation. In other words, the driver should be allowed to change her focus from the road to other tasks without getting an alarm from the driver monitoring system. We need to develop and work with solutions that can monitor the driver and ensure that she is not for example sleeping or ill and can take over the control of the vehicle with a short notice. The reliability of a system like this must be extremely high as it is not allowed to falsely interpret the driver’s status or send a false alarm disturbing the driver.

We have experience with alerting systems like steering wheels, seat belts and seats with haptic feedback, lights in and around the dashboard and audio. Existing visual monitoring systems include for example eye tracking and vision-based attention and drowsiness monitoring. Also, touch detection is used in steering wheels. Currently, most of the driver monitoring systems expect that the driver is focused on driving and on road to function properly. However, this is not a prerequisite for conditional automated driving systems and thus new solutions are needed. If your company can contribute to developing the next generation of driver monitoring systems especially for highly automated commercial vehicles, be sure to be in touch with us!