BENGALURU: A student of Indian Institute of Science (IISc) here has devised a system that can help stop speeding vehicles as they approach an obstacle.
Aditya Chowdhary, an M.Tech student at IISc, has won the first place for this invention at the Cadence Design Contest 2015 conducted by electronic automation company Cadence.
Aditya developed it as part of his Master’s project while he was a student of the Department of Electronic Systems Engineering, with the guidance of Prof Gaurab Banerjee. He now works in Cypress, a semiconductor company.
Aditya told Express, “This chip can be employed in an automobile while parking. It can, for example, tell us the exact distance where a wall is. We have been working on it for the past one year.”
He said the aim is to embed it in automobiles. “In the dark, we cannot see an obstacle. A car equipped with the device will stop on its own when it sees one at a certain distance.”
The setup consists of two antennae and a silicon chip. The transmitting antenna sends out a signal from the chip. The obstacle reflects the signal and the receiving antenna senses it. The frequency of this received signal is proportional to the distance from the obstacle.
The technology can find the relative velocity of a target and the direction of arrival of the reflected signal. It can hence be incorporated into high-end automobiles to provide collision warning, parking assistance, blind spot detection and auto braking. It can recognise hand gestures and can be used in watches, TVs and computers.
Banerjee said, “We are talking about smart cars and self-driving vehicles. Collision avoidance radars are set at high frequencies above 60 Ghz (gigahertz). These are technologies used in other strategic applications because of which we have no access to them.”