At a busy North American Commercial Vehicle Show (NACV) for Bendix this week in Atlanta, the company also made a series of enhancements to its Wingman Fusion advanced driver assistance system (ADAS).
The company says the next evolution product of Wingman Fusion will offer highway departure braking and multi-lane automatic emergency braking, along with strengthened collision mitigation and braking capabilities to more effectively reduce vehicle speeds in hazardous situations. The new features, along with further enhancement of existing collision mitigation technology, will come through software advancements, Bendix says, meaning current Fusion customers will be able to upgrade to the new capabilities with no need to purchase new hardware components.
Additionally, the next generation of Fusion will be able to link with the new Bendix BlindSpotter 2.0 Side Object Detection System, integrating data from the side-radar unit and enabling additional features integrating BlindSpotter information with Fusion capabilities to help driver mitigate side-swipe and blindspot crashes.
“What enables Fusion to make better decisions with fewer false alerts and interventions is a combination of constantly improving computer analysis and more data into the system,” says Fred Andersky, Bendix director of customer solutions – Controls. “It’s integrating information from camera and radars — both front and, eventually, side, along with a vehicle’s brake sensors, and linking these systems together. It’s this linking together, not just in parallel, that makes Wingman Fusion a platform for the future, upon which even greater vehicle and highway safety technologies can be built.”
Bendix says the upcoming Fusion 2.0 will also be able to provide full braking power on the tractor, compared with the two-thirds power currently possible. Combined with the improved sensor and data analysis, Bendix says in an emergency situation the system will be able to reduce a vehicle’s speed by as much as 50 percent more than the current Fusion system.
“As we look down the road to more automated and autonomous vehicle technology, sensor fusion – the ability to integrate more sensors which, in turn, provides more vehicle and environmental information — is an absolutely critical component,” Andersky says. “That’s why we’ve developed Fusion as we have, always keeping in mind the need to handle more data from more sources, and to use it effectively with functional technologies. Today’s best system is one that’s already prepared for tomorrow’s possibilities.”
The BlindSpotter detection system will feature a new, more effective radar unit and retains its original shape and size, making for easy in-service replacements and retrofit installs.
“We’ve gotten a lot of great feedback from fleets using BlindSpotter over the years, and with the rapid recent growth in adoption of collision mitigation technology, one of the most frequent requests we’ve heard is for integration of the side-facing radar unit into the active safety systems like Wingman Fusion,” says Andersky.
New automatic parking brake system
Bendix also introduces Intellipark, an automatic parking brake technology that replaces the manual air parking brake with easy-to-apply electronic switches.
Automatically setting the parking brake if the driver exits the vehicle without engaging the brake, Bendix says the system will deliver safety, value, and a quick return on investment to fleets adopting it.
“You could think of rollaways as the industry’s little secret — something that happens but few people talk about — unless you search online for ‘rollaways.’ In fact, nearly 60 percent of fleet managers who participated in a Frost & Sullivan survey confirmed that they had experienced a rollaway in a 24-month period,” says Anderksy.
