Magnetic roads to guide self-driving cars?
Volvo is investigating how magnets could be used to keep self-driving cars on the road.
The Swedish automaker says the technology will enable lanes to be narrowed and help improve road maintenance.
At its testing facility in Hällered, Sweden, the company embedded round ferrite magnets measuring 40 x 15mm at a depth of 200mm below the surface of a 100m long test track. A test vehicle equipped with several magnetic sensors was driven on the road at a range of speeds.
"Accurate, reliable positioning is a necessary prerequisite for a self-driving car," said Jonas Ekmark, preventive safety leader at Volvo Car Group. "The magnets create an invisible 'railway' that literally paves the way for a positioning inaccuracy of less than one decimetre."
Ekmark described the results so far as 'promising'. He believes it would be possible to put autonomous vehicles on the road without changes to present infrastructure, within the next ten years.
"Our experience so far is that ferrite magnets are an efficient, reliable and relatively cheap solution, both when it comes to the infrastructure and on-board sensor technology," Ekmark said. "The next step is to conduct tests in real-life traffic."
