Delphi Continues to Provide Leadership in Active Safety Technologies

Delphi offers a unique line of active safety systems to complement its passive line

TROY, Mich. — Delphi Corp. continues to help vehicle manufacturers make vehicles safer by providing a complete portfolio of active and passive safety products that are being continually improved through engineering design innovation.

A pioneer in developing low-cost, high-performance radar, Delphi will announce a new generation of radar sensor used for smart or adaptive cruise control (with stop & go), pre-crash mitigation with autonomous brake assist, pedestrian detection and collision warning at this year’s IAA (International Automobil-Ausstellung) in Frankfurt. The technology will become available in 2009.

“Delphi took on what seemed like an insurmountable task of converting very expensive, low-volume, military aerospace radar systems into less expensive, high-volume radar for passenger cars nearly two decades ago,” said Jeff Owens, president of Delphi Electronics & Safety division. “We are very pleased that our hard work is now paying off and providing benefits for consumers and automakers by making their vehicles safer.”

Delphi’s newest radar sensor will enable better performance at a lower cost, making it possible for vehicle manufacturers to offer collision mitigation technology across a larger percentage of their fleets. This next generation radar has a wide field of view and provides simultaneous long and medium range capabilities in a single sensor. The radar allows OEMs to eliminate redundant sensors, achieving system cost-savings up to 50 percent over today’s products. Using a proprietary waveform with innovative low-cost electronic scanning antenna/transceiver, enhanced target detection is achieved while increasing reliability with no moving parts.

Delphi Vision Systems and Sensor Fusion

Sensor data fusion is an approach to combining multiple sensor technologies to achieve greater performance than available with an individual sensor. Delphi utilizes the complimentary technologies of radar and vision to provide higher quality inputs into their threat assessment algorithms for collision mitigation and avoidance applications. Radar is used to detect object range and range rate, while vision systems confirms the classification of identified objects: vehicles, traffic signs, bridges, tunnels etc. Fusing this data allows for an enhanced look at the road ahead, and allows greater performance of active safety systems.

Delphi Integrated Camera System

Delphi is working on a single integrated CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) camera-based system that provides multiple safety enhancements at a lower cost than independent systems. Delphi’s expertise and intellectual properties in vision system hardware and algorithms enable a single camera to provide multiple functions. In addition to enhancing performance of smart cruise control and pre-crash systems, the vision system can integrate additional features such as lane departure warning, intelligent head lamp control, rain and light sensing, active (near IR) night vision, rain sensing, traffic sign recognition and pedestrian detection.

Delphi utilizes certain vision algorithms developed by MobilEye N.V. with their EyeQ vision processor in the development of these vision and sensor fusion systems.

Delphi’s unique approach provides a scalable vision architecture that allows for a simple up-grade path to more complex features using the same single camera system. In addition, a single camera also simplifies vehicle packaging, eliminating redundant cameras and other standalone products that compete for limited windshield space.

Featured Delphi vision technologies include:

Lane Departure Warning

Delphi’s Forewarn Lane Departure Warning system tracks painted lane boundaries and helps alert the driver should the vehicle start to un-intentionally drift out of its lane, helping to greatly reduce one of the largest causes of vehicle crashes.

Rain Sensing
The same camera operates the rain sensing function that activates wipers when moisture is detected on the windshield, with the addition of a small proprietary optical system.

Intelligent Head Lamp Control
Using the single camera, intelligent head lamp control automatically activates the high-beams according to lighting and traffic conditions and automatically dim headlights for on-coming traffic and when approaching vehicles from the rear.

Active Night Vision
Active night vision uses near infrared headlamps to illuminate the road scene ahead and displays an enhanced image in the vehicle. This system provides high-beam visibility without blinding on-coming traffic. The system provides more natural looking images to the driver than thermal vision systems and allows non-thermal intense objects like trees and lane markers to be seen. .

Pedestrian Recognition
The camera also enables pedestrian detection, a system that detects and classifies pedestrians. It predicts potential pedestrian impact and activates countermeasures to mitigate injuries. Pedestrian protection technologies are gaining much attention in Europe and other countries with densely populated cities.

Road Sign Recognition
Using the same camera to recognize and read road and traffic signs, the system can alert the drive to varying conditions ahead such as speed limits and no-passing zones.

In addition to active safety, Delphi provides a large portfolio of steering wheels, driver passenger, side and curtain airbags, seatbelts, passenger detection technologies.

For more information about Delphi (PINKSHEETS: DPHIQ), visit www.delphi.com.