The A-Z of ADAS

Introduction 👋

One of the most talked about points of the 2023 Toyota Innova Hycross revolved around a small black component on the front grill along with a camera housing behind the rear view mirror of the vehicle. These, along with a few more components, are part of Toyota’s “Safety Sense 3.0” suite of ADAS features.

ADAS refers to Advanced Driver Assistance Systems. While almost every manufacturer coins a different term for their own set of ADAS features — it eventually boils down to a similar set of systems and features that are essentially meant to aid the driver in, well, driving.

That sounded simple enough, right? But putting pen to paper, or in this case putting wires on a circuit board, is a very complex yet beautiful task. Let’s take a closer look.

Exploring ADAS 🔭

As mentioned above, ADAS is used to aid the driver in day to day driving. Here are the most common ways in which this objective is achieved -

[ADAS can roughly be categorised into two segments — Active ADAS and Passive ADAS. Since Passive ADAS features (like ABS, ESC, Reversing Camera, Parking Sensors, etc.) are fairly common these days, I’m going to focus solely on the Active ADAS features in this blog]

[Also note that not all manufacturers offer all the features mentioned below and to the same extent]

1. City Driving Assistance

1.1 Autonomous Emergency Breaking (AEB)
Automatically applies breaks when the car thinks that it is going to crash into another vehicle, a pedestrian, a cyclist or an animal.

1.2 Blind Spot Monitoring
Alerts the driver of any vehicles in their blindspot, helps in preventing the driver to smash into another vehicle when changing lanes.

1.3 Rear Cross Traffic Alert
Alerts (and in most cases also applies breaks) in case the driver is about to crash into oncoming traffic while reversing out of a parking space.

1.4 Automatic Parking Assist (aka Handsfree Parking)
Uses various systems which allow the car to park itself — usually performs both parallel and perpendicular parking. The driver only has to give throttle inputs (and in the case of some manufacturers, even this is not required), the steering is controlled by the car itself.

1.5 Automated Headlamps
These not only turn on automatically when it gets dark, but some manufacturers have advanced their LED headlight technology to the point where the car can automatically blank out parts of its beam, in order to not dazzle oncoming drivers.

2. Motorway / Highway Driving Assistance

2.1 Automatic Cruise Control
This generally uses a radar mounted on the front bumper of the car to actively adjust its speed and distance, relative to that of the vehicle in front. Say if you’ve set the cruising speed to 90 km/h and the vehicle in front slows down to 70 momentarily, your car will automatically apply the breaks to keep you at a safe distance from the car in front — and it even speeds back up to the set speed once the car in front does so. In some cars, using data from the camera / GPS, it even slows the vehicle down as per the maximum speed limit of the road. In certain cars, it also uses the other sensors to change lanes when the indicator is used!

2.2 Lane Keeping Assist
Using cameras mounted behind the rear view mirror, the car is able to read the lanes on the road and automatically adjusts the steering to keep you in the middle of the lane

2.3 Lane Departure warning
Using the same system mentioned above, the car alerts the driver, usually via a mild vibration of the steering wheel, implying that the driver is weaving over the lane.

3. Newer ADAS Features

3.1 Driver Drowsiness Detection
Based on different inputs (like a sensor that monitors the driver’s head movements, patterns of how much the driver is keeping the car within the lanes, etc.), the driver is warned by either flashing lights on the dashboard or via vibrations in the steering wheel.

3.2 Vehicle Summon (Tesla)
By using all the sensors in it’s autopilot suite, tesla owners can “summon” their vehicles in parking lots, however, this feature still feels like a beta at the moment.

The Science behind the Witchcraft 🧙‍♂️

ADAS uses a whole suite of sensors to get the job done.

The three main components are -

• Radar / Lidar
  These sensors are mainly housed in the front bumper of the car, and also on the corners of the rear bumper. They are used to measure distances from objects like vehicles in front and also along the blind spots and are mainly used in Adaptive Cruise Control systems and Blind Spot Detection. The Radar sends out radio waves and also catches the ones that bounce back off of other objects. This helps in determining distances.
• Cameras
  Cameras are mounted on all four sides of the car — one on the front, one below each ORVM (Outside Rear View Mirror) and one on the tailgate. These help in stitching together a 360 degree view around the car. There is also a camera housing behind the IRVM (Inside Rear View Mirror) which is used to scan the road ahead for keeping track of the lanes, speed signs and pedestrians / cyclists.
• Ultrasonic Sensors
  These are the parking sensors on the front and rear of cars. They can also be electromagnetic instead of ultrasonic, but the working principle is the same as a radar — sending out ultrasonic / electromagnetic waves and catching those that bounce back. The difference here is the range, these are effective in short range in contrast to radar.

These sensors are connected to various SoCs (Systems on a chip) which are further linked to actuators through interfaces and high-performance electronic controller units (ECUs). Based on various finely tuned algorithms, the car is able to make decisions and hence assist the drive in various situations.

While this is the setup that almost all manufacturers use, there is one exception — and of course it is Tesla. Recently, Tesla decided to ditch ultrasonic sensors in favour of a purely camera based ADAS. I’ll cover how this works in a future blog, so be on the lookout for that :)

Seeing how well ADAS features assist in driving, one question has surely popped up in your mind — can a car with all these ADAS features drive itself entirely? Well yes, ADAS can be thought of as a seed that’ll eventually bear the fruit of Autonomous Cars. Autonomy in cars has been classified into various levels ranging from 0 to 5. Cars with ADAS tech have achieved upto Level 2 (and arguably even level 3) on this autonomy scale, with the higher levels still at least a few years away.

ADAS and NCAP 🥽

NCAP stands for New Car Assessment Program. It is essentially an organisation that tests various cars on their safety for adult as well as child occupants. They put vehicles through a number of tests, both which check the vehicle’s ability to avoid crashes as well as it’s safety performance in the event of an accident. They then assign scores to the cars that they test to help quantify the safety aspect of a vehicle.

As I mentioned above, crash prevention is also a very important metric in the NCAP tests, and ADAS takes the spotlight in this matter. Thus, we can automatically associate ADAS in cars with safety, and this is a huge deal for customers.

ADAS in India 🇮🇳

Better late than never, ADAS has finally started to make its way into the Indian Automotive market. As of today, there are about 6–7 cars which feature ADAS tech on Indian roads, but this number is soon expected to grow.

Since this technology has already existed in foreign markets for a long time now, it has always been available to manufacturers. With the introduction of ADAS in one segment, the competitors in that segment will also bring it in to avoid getting left behind.

That being said, there are a lot of challenges that manufacturers need to take into consideration when it comes to Indian roads -

• the lack of demarkation of lanes
• excessive congestion and really tight bumper-to-bumper traffic
• more than just vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists on roads to account for

These are just a few of the things that immediately come to mind, and will be real task to get around.

Conclusion 🎬

When we’re talking of ADAS in India, we’re not talking about cars costing north of 40–50L. With cars like the Mahindra XUV700, Honda City E Hybrid, etc., this technology is now available to consumers in the most popular segments, price wise. This is gonna lead to ADAS being a standard very soon — just like in the European markets.

Also, with the Global NCAP and movements like #SaferCarsForIndia, people and manufacturers are going to start laying more and more emphasis on safety of cars — and they’ll realise the value and importance of ADAS for the same.

This, ultimately, is a huge win for consumers!