Bright Signals: Innovative Automotive Lighting for Enhanced Communication

Vehicle lighting has moved far beyond simple illumination. Emerging lighting advances now enable cars to visually communicate driving intent, hazards, and autonomy status to surrounding traffic participants.

As vehicles gain sensing capabilities and driving automation, effectively conveying a vehicle's awareness and next moves is critical for safety. While sensor and computing advances enable this understanding of the local environment, innovative lighting fulfills the final step - externally signaling what the vehicle is sensing, planning, and doing.

Let's explore some of the most promising automotive lighting innovations for enhanced visual communication.

1. High-Resolution Exterior Lighting

New high density, individually-controllable lighting arrays allow vehicles to signal upcoming maneuvers with dynamic lighting patterns and brightness modulation.

Pixelated LED Matrices

Conventional lighting elements constrain a vehicle to broad, static signals. In contrast, new high resolution LED matrices integrated into headlights, tail lights and displays enable complex signaling. Software can activate these thousands of lighting pixels in customizable sequences.

Localized & Directional Emissions

With discrete control of lighting zones, vehicles can emit signals from specific areas to indicate localized hazards or the direction of an intended turn. This focused signaling provides more relevant, precise information to surrounding road users compared to broad blinking signals.

Expanded Color Range

Full RGB LED matrices open up a diverse color palette for lighting-based communication. Different colors, brightness levels, and directional cues provide myriad options for signaling vehicles, pedestrians, and infrastructure.

2. Augmented Reality Road Projection

Powerful headlights allow vehicles to visually highlight risks in the roadway by targeting and projecting light onto them. This dynamic augmented reality road view alerts both the vehicle and other traffic to debris, animals, or pedestrians ahead.

LiDAR Object Detection

Sophisticated perception systems like LiDAR identify objects and potential hazards ahead by actively scanning the vehicle's surroundings.

Targeted Spot Light Projection

Once detected, swiveling high-intensity headlights can automatically aim a circle of light directly onto roadway risks for enhanced visibility. This visually links the risk and the vehicle’s awareness.

Warning Symbol Projection

Taking visual augmentation further, lighting can be modulated to cast warning symbols, directional arrows, or hazard markings directly onto the road surface. This alerts surrounding traffic to risks ahead.

3. Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications

Dedicated short-range networking allows equipped vehicles to broadcast maneuvering intentions directly to other nearby vehicles. This enables collaborative awareness for locally coordinated driving.

Dedicated Short-Range Signals

All new vehicles are integrating DSRC radios for direct low-latency vehicle-to-vehicle data exchange. Information like hard braking, location, trajectory and turn signals are shared between vehicles.

Collaborative Sensor Sharing

Networked sensor sharing goes beyond line-of-sight. It allows vehicles to share raw sensor data from cameras, radars, and LiDARs to collaboratively build a real-time environmental model spanning multiple vehicles. This provides an expanded field of view for early risk detection.

Coordinated Warnings

When hazards are detected, connected vehicles can use lights, sounds, and direct data signals to mutually alert each other of risks ahead. This tight feedback loop promotes safer coordinated driving.

4. Autonomous Driving Signals

With autonomous vehicles entering public roads, dedicated lights keep passengers and pedestrians informed if the human or the computer is driving.

External System State Lights

Exterior lamps clearly indicate the vehicle’s current autonomous system state, such as manual driving mode, assisted driving, or fully autonomous mode. This communicates authority and control accountability to those around the vehicle.

Intent Displays

Specialized front-facing signaling communicates the real-time intent of autonomous vehicles, including braking, accelerating and turning patterns. Human drivers come to intuitively understand behaviors through experience. Explicit intent displays build similar intuition between autonomous vehicles and humans.

Passenger Communication

Interior screens detail the vehicle’s planned next moves to keep passengers informed. Route maps, identified risks, maneuver planning, and system status foster trust and transparency.

As vehicles evolve sensing and self-driving capabilities, advanced lighting unlocks new avenues for comprehensive communication with passengers, pedestrians and other vehicles. With innovative lighting signaling risks, intentions, and vehicle autonomy states, next-generation vehicles can promote safer and more coordinated autonomous functionality. Intelligent lighting is critical in establishing trust in emerging autonomous vehicles through enhanced visual communication.