This week, Bosch introduced a predictive road condition service that can help make sure self-driving vehicles remain safe even on wet and icy roads.
The technology takes multiple possible weather forecast scenarios from Finnish company Foreca into consideration, so a vehicle that uses it knows how and where it can drive autonomously. Bosch says this can prevent vehicles from having to hand over controls to a human driver at the first sign of poor road conditions. This, however, only applies to vehicles that still have steering wheels and systems that have not yet reached Level 4 or 5 autonomous driving capabilities.
When Bosch rolls out its road condition alert service in 2020, it will rely entirely on Foreca's weather information. In the future, though, it also will take data shared by self-driving cars using the technology into account.
The system will upload temperatures inside and outside vehicles, as well as other information such as whether their windshield wipers are in use and how many times their anti-skid system got activated, to Bosch's cloud. In the end, the technology is bound to become more accurate and reliable as more automated vehicles make their way to public roads.
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Source: Engadget
