Audi Urban intelligent assist project! mapping in the top gear

Connected car technology will not be a geeky word in 2013 when Audi along with NavteQ and other research partners choose to launch the following systems.

• Audi Urban Assistance: will deal with finding the correct way to bring relevant urban information to the driver, minimizing distraction, information overload, and stress. The research focus is on determining critical information in urban situations, such as vehicle and pedestrian detection for intersection safety, available parking spaces near a destination, or the governing traffic rules at the time of arrival (no parking, car pool lanes, no left turn, etc.). The systems would then find the correct medium to convey this information to the driver.

• Audi Urban Crash Analysis: a study using extensive accident databases with the aim of finding “accident hot spots” in urban centers. The idea is to understand what scenarios in urban driving environments pose the higher threats and difficulties for drivers, leading to a higher number of accidents. Understanding the circumstances and scenarios of accidents, it is possible to determine likely causes, and this information will be important for the design of systems to mitigate or eliminate these threats in the connected Audi of the future. 

• Audi Urban Diagnostics: will be focused on getting and aggregating historic and real time urban data from multiple sources, to support the overall goal of the Urban Intelligent Assist initiative. This data will include traffic and traffic controlling information (i.e. traffic lights, etc.), parking availability, urban events (sports events, concerts, accidents, etc.) among other, in order to get an up-to-the-minute snapshot of the city, but also to make predictions on what the city is going to look like in the near future (15 to 60 minutes from now). 

• Audi Urban Navigation: will use urban information collected from multiple on and off board sources to predict how the city flows through the day, and use this in combination to the driver diagnostic information to generate the most comfortable and efficient route for each driver, and to give recommendations about route planning and execution tailor made to each user to make each trip a smart and stress-free one.