More and more automobiles are becoming equipped with sensors, radars, and cameras as part of various assistance systems keeping drivers and occupants safe on the road. Honda, however, wants to use them for more than just keeping the driver and passengers safe. Instead, the automaker believes these can be used to help monitor road conditions.
Honda is developing a new system that will help identify road conditions by using GPS coordinates and sensors such as cameras to collect real-time information shared with other road users. Called the Road Condition Monitoring System, it is currently being tested in collaboration with the Ohio Department of Transportation in the United States.
“Maintaining good road conditions helps keep everyone sharing the road safe. Real-time, high-accuracy roadway data captured from connected vehicles has the potential to improve the process of identifying, reporting, and more quickly repairing hazardous road conditions,” said Paritosh Kelkar, the project leader of Honda's road condition monitoring system.
The system will classify lane markings depending on their condition using four colors. Green and yellow indicate ideal or good quality lane markers, red indicates markers in need of repair, and gray means there are no markers present at all. All that data is then captured using the existing cameras and sensors onboard Honda vehicles and sent to a secure platform for analysis and verification. Road operators can then access this platform to identify the location, type, and severity of the road condition and hazard information.
In addition to lane markings, Honda Research Institute plans to expand the system’s application to monitor other types of road conditions. It hopes the system can prove useful in keeping all roads safer for everyone.
There's no word yet whether Honda's new system will be introduced in other countries outside of the US. We think it would be very useful in the Philippines, considering how bad road conditions are in the country.
