Ford working on smarter warning alerts

Ford, like other car manufacturers, uses driver alerts in the form of visual displays and warning tones to help negotiate daily drives. But what if such sounds simulated those made by potential hazards and enabled drivers to know exactly where, and what, they were coming from?

Directional audio alert aims to do just that. The Ford-developed system uses information from the sensors to select the appropriate sound and play it through the speaker closest to the obstacle.

Engineers are exploring use of in-car audio to clearly convey the location of other road users or pedestrians. In addition, they are testing the use of intuitive sounds — such as footsteps, bicycle bells and the sound of passing cars — rather than a single tone.

Tests in a simulated environment showed that drivers alerted by directional audio correctly identified the nature and source of the hazard 74% of the time. Even just emitting a regular tone from the appropriate speaker enabled the driver to correctly identify the location of the object 70% of the time.

“Today’s warning tones already inform drivers when they need to take care and be vigilant. Tomorrow’s technology could alert us to both exactly what the hazard is and where it is coming from,” said Oliver Kirstein, Sync software engineer,enterprise connectivity at Ford of Europe.

Ford vehicles now feature driver assistance technologies that use a suite of sensors to identify when pedestrians, cyclists and other vehicles are nearby. These technologies offer visual and audible alerts and if necessary, apply emergency braking.

Engineers set up a real-world scenario on a test track, with a vehicle backing out of a parking space, an approaching pedestrian and the footsteps alert. Participants in the test responded positively to the footsteps sound, especially when this intuitive alert was played through a specific speaker.

In future, engineers believe that those results might be further improved by using 3D spatial sound similar to that used in cinemas and gaming to better enable drivers to identify the source of the hazard.