ADASKY CES 2020 heating up the car of the future

Safety on the road

Have you ever heard something said for the first time, and it made so much sense it struck you that it had never been said before? The words have swirled around in the universe since time began, but never quite put in that exact phrase?

It’s the same with an idea. You see glimpses of an idea in a movie or in a project, but when you see the pure exquisiteness of an idea put forth, you wonder how it couldn’t have already been brought to market.

What is thermal imaging?

What does a woman in a slinky black outfit and black ice have in common? Both can be recognized by thermal imaging. Every object has it’s own heat, and can be measured by that energy coming off the object.

Yakov Shaharabani, CEO of ADASKY, and a former Israeli pilot in the military created a thermal imaging company, is making both in-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure solutions to solve edge cases lidar and traditional cameras have difficulty solving.

Cameras, radar, and lidar dominate the industry, but AdaSky uses a solid-state camera called Viper, the first thermal infrared (LWIR) camera with proprietary algorithms explicitly designed for driverless cars.

It’s a duh moment, really. I’ve seen movies of military maneuvers using thermal temperature in low-visibility, such as dark, snow, or rain, rather than visual images. It was Shaharabani that pointed out that most 5-star ratings are done in the daytime. Thermal imaging can be done in the daytime and nighttime.

It is an important technology that should be part of the advanced driver and assistance (ADAS) systems and automated driving systems in the future. As Shaharabani said, no OEM would want a system that is blind for a second.