Telstra and Adelaide company Cohda Wireless have conducted what they say is the first test in Australia of technology that communicates between a pedestrian’s or cyclist’s mobile phone and a motor vehicle to help the driver to avoid a collision.
Telstra says the technology, which uses an app on the mobile phone and Cohda Wireless technology in the car, was tested using common scenarios such as a car and a cyclist approaching a blind corner, a car reversing out of a driveway and a car approaching a pedestrian crossing.
It follows Telstra and Cohda trialling vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) technology over Telstra’s 4G network in South Australia late last year (CDN, Oct 5, 2016).
Telstra chief technology officer Håkan Eriksson said: “This is the first time vehicle-to-pedestrian technology has been trialled in Australia on a 4G network, and is an important step on the journey to fully-autonomous vehicles on Australian roads.”
Cohda Wireless has been working on collision avoidance technology for a number of years, initially using vehicle-to-vehicle communications based on a variant of WiFi. It has participated in a number of large-scale trials in Australia, the US and Europe and is now securing commercial sales for installation into production vehicles.
