Flashing LED lights could help self-driving cars navigate better at night

Engineers are working on all sorts of technologies that could make cars smarter and help drivers stay safe–lasers, radar, ad-hoc WiFi, and advanced image recognition are all on the table. However, these are all complicated and expensive to implement. Intel research scientist Richard Roberts has a different idea. It may be possible to use visible light emitted by LEDs to create a low-cost automobile mesh network. Many cars already have LED headlights that could be used in such a system, so we’re already off to a good start. Intel has been working on so-called visible light communication (VLC) since 2008, but it has been on the back burner as of late. Roberts hopes that its potential as a car-to-car communication platform could renew interest. The system described by Roberts and his colleagues would use a series of rapid pulses of visible light to relay information from one car to another. These LED flashes would be so short as to be invisible to the human eye, but could potentially tell other cars about traffic conditions down the road, positioning, possible collisions, and (if you put it all together) even as part of an autonomous driving system.