New Headlights Make Raindrops Disappear
Do you ever have trouble driving through rain
at night because every raindrop reflects your headlights? Carnegie Mellon’s
Robotics Institute has developed a new type of car headlight that reduces glare
from falling rain or snow. The technology is akin to running between the
raindrops -with light! Associate robotics professor Srinivasa Narasimhan
explained:
The system uses a camera to track the motion of raindrops and snowflakes
and then applies a computer algorithm to predict where those particles will be
just a few milliseconds later. The light projection system then adjusts to
deactivate light beams that would otherwise illuminate the particles in their
predicted positions.
“A human eye will not be able to see that flicker of the headlights,”
Narasimhan said. “And because the precipitation particles aren’t being
illuminated, the driver won’t see the rain or snow either.”
To people, rain can appear as elongated streaks that seem to fill the air.
To high-speed cameras, however, rain consists of sparsely spaced, discrete
drops. That leaves plenty of space between the drops where light can be
effectively distributed if the system can respond rapidly, Narasimhan
said.
In their lab tests, Narasimhan and his research team demonstrated that
their system could detect raindrops, predict their movement and adjust a light
projector accordingly in 13 milliseconds. At low speeds, such a system could
eliminate 70 to 80 percent of visible rain during a heavy storm, while losing
only 5 or 6 percent of the light from the headlamp.
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