#SelfDriving Defined: How heated washer fluid eliminates envirofencing
Rachel Fukaya, Director of Brand
In case you missed it, last week we defined what team SEEVA calls envirofencing, the climate cousin to geofencing.
Our team strongly believes that software alone cannot eliminate envirofencing constraints for autonomous vehicles. Even the most advanced camera, LiDAR or sensor will eventually need to be cleaned of mud, bugs and other environmental elements to function properly.
And we shouldn’t have to rely on human hands to clean off these perception surfaces every time they need a good scrub, which is the current solution for ADAS-equipped vehicles.
I grew up in California where beautiful monarch butterflies congregate and multiply every year. I would spend the end of each summer month using long tweezers to pull hundreds of smashed butterflies out of my Ford Escape’s grill. I probably spent a collective forty hours, by the end of summer, cleaning the grill and it wasn’t even a necessity, I just couldn’t stand to look at all the dead butterflies. Forty hours of downtime for an AV would equate to tens of thousands of lost dollars in revenue, per vehicle. In our autonomous future, it makes absolutely no sense to have all this advanced technology that can’t do something as simple as clean itself when it gets dirty. Aside from the lost revenue, we’re also talking about the safety of people and goods in each AV.
This is where we see an opportunity to leverage a trusted solution, that’s already formulated for vehicles, to enable perception surfaces in all conditions…
Heated washer fluid.
Now you’re probably asking yourself: why heated washer fluid? Heated washer fluid works best for cleaning AV perception surfaces because it lowers the surface tension of ice, dirt and bugs while providing higher solubility than cold fluids.
Research from SEEVA’s R&D lab has shown that, compared to cold washer fluid, heated washer fluid enables a vehicle to use far less fluid to clean perception surfaces. This means there’s no need to account for a car using dramatically more washer fluid than vehicles today that already contain fluid reservoirs for cleaning windshields.
The SEEVAtherm family of products uses waste energy to rapidly heat washer fluid and then distribute and deploy this heated washer fluid, in a fraction of a second, to flash-clean perception stacks like windshields, headlamps, cameras and LiDAR, all increasing a vehicle’s uptime and revenue.
Scaling autonomous vehicles to mass adoption means eliminating geo and envirofencing constraints to increase the vehicles safety and uptime. This is what drives team SEEVA.
