{"id":310119,"date":"2026-02-25T21:23:10","date_gmt":"2026-02-25T21:23:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/310119\/"},"modified":"2026-02-25T21:23:10","modified_gmt":"2026-02-25T21:23:10","slug":"this-hardware-add-on-could-improves-autonomous-vehicle-safety","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/310119\/","title":{"rendered":"This Hardware Add On Could Improves Autonomous Vehicle Safety"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hop inside a robotaxi, cruising the streets of San Francisco or Phoenix and you may come away thinking these driverless cars operate on magic.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Not quite fairydust, but they are backed by a series of sophisticated technologies, including machine-learning software, high-definition cameras and state-of-the-art sensors. Even so, these vehicles are not foolproof \u2014 they can have problems with how they perceive other objects or people on the road.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Developed in part by Northeastern University Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Ravinder Dahiya<\/a>, a new component\u00a0 inspired by biology and designed to improve these vehicles\u2019 vision may make them even more responsive in the future.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In a newly published paper<\/a> in Nature Communications, Dahiya and his co-authors outline new perception technologies that they designed and developed to mimic how a human retina analyzes visual changes.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The goal of the hardware is to reduce time delays between when an autonomous system sees an object and when it can analyze it and take action, a particularly important issue for driverless vehicles which operate in proximity to pedestrians, Dahiya said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Researchers say they were able to tackle this challenge by taking advantage of synaptic transistors, electrical devices designed to simulate the neural pathways of the brain. The work builds on previous research Dahiya has conducted that involved using these \u201cneuromorphic\u201d or brain-like sensing technologies.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe call it neuromorphic behavior because that\u2019s pretty much how processing takes place in our body.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The researchers\u2019 system is designed to emulate a human\u2019s ability to take in and make sense of visual information, even as that information is changing, such as when someone\u2019s hair is blowing in the wind, or in the case of a robotaxi, a pedestrian walking in the car\u2019s path.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"RavinderRavinder Dahiya, a professor electrical and computer engineering, helped the developed the vision system component. Photo by Matthew Modoono\/Northeastern University<\/p>\n

This is part of human\u2019s ability to store information about a scene and only update it to account for changes over time, Dahiya said. These are what are known as \u201ctemporal motion cues,\u201d the researchers write.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

By focusing only on areas of change, an autonomous system lightens how much work it has to do in any given moment, which in turn decreases processing time.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThis research is about identifying those regions of interest,\u201d said Dahiya. \u201cWe are doing that with the hardware, so that you are processing less data and enhancing speed.\u201d<\/p>\n

The researchers tested their vision system in several simulation scenarios \u2014 including autonomous vehicle driving and robotic arm operations \u2014 to study its capacity to predict motion and track objects.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What they found is that compared to more traditional image processing systems, their hardware had a 400% increase in processing speed.<\/p>\n

These synaptic transistors could one day be installed on a range of autonomous systems, aside from driverless vehicles, including smart glasses and industrial robot arms, which are often used in tasks that require correctly identifying objects or materials.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

But it may take a while for industry partners to develop the infrastructure needed to support this form of visual learning in the long run, he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Companies like NVIDIA, the artificial intelligence chipmaker, for example have developed chips capable of specialized software that can run artificial intelligence, but they haven\u2019t released similarly capable, analog hardware-based neuromorphic systems.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

So for now this technology will likely remain in academia, he said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s going to take some extra effort to get the right kind of hardware that this approach needs,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hop inside a robotaxi, cruising the streets of San Francisco or Phoenix and you may come away thinking…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":310120,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[345,85,46,6361,33668,125],"class_list":["post-310119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-ai","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-robotics","tag-self-driving-cars","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310119\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/310120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}