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Bosch Develops Warning System For Wrong Way Ghost Drivers +VIDEO


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By Henny Hemmes
Sr. European Editor
THE AUTO CHANNEL


STUTTGART - June 23, 2015: Automotive supplier and development company Robert Bosch GmbH has showed a system that warns drivers when they are about to drive up an exit and become a ghost driver. The system can also warn drivers when a ghost driver is heading in their direction on the wrong side of the road.

Last year some two thousand ghost drivers were on the German roads, causing around 50 deathly accidents. In five US states, there were in total some 3,500 fatalities caused by WWD.

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To prevent accidents, Bosch has developed a wrong-way driver warning (WWDW), an app for the smart phone that will soon become available for consumers and can be downloaded without costs.

It speaks for itself, that the system is also important for car manufacturers who can integrate it in the board computer of their models. The wrong-way driver warning alarms the driver when he or she drives on the wrong road with an acoustic signal and a visual by means of a large white-red triangle with the word ‘stop’ in the display or in the head-up display of their car.

The German company demonstrated the system in prototypes and also showed us an extra function: the automatic emergency stop.The Bosch engineers do not expect that this function will be used in due course, because of legislation issues. A second function of the WWDW alarms other drivers about a ghost driver on their route. The warning will be sent through the cloud to the smart phone with the free app, or to the infrastructure that operates the signs about the roads.




The connectivity based safety function predictively warns the wrong-way driver based on algorithms using road sign recognition and electronic horizon or GPS and cloud. The system require a camera, GPS, UMTS, a wireless interface to car HMI, server and service.

The Bosch safety app will become available in the summer of 2016 and I expect the car manufacturers to speed up the implementation of the WWDW system in their upcoming models.