DMDs for smart headlights

Abstract

The primary goal of a vehicular headlight is to improve safety in low-light and poor weather conditions. The typical headlight however has very limited flexibility - switching between high and low beams, turning off beams toward the opposing lane or rotating the beam as the vehicle turns - and is not designed for all driving environments. Thus, despite decades of innovation in light source technology, more than half of the vehicular accidents still happen at night even with much less traffic on the road. We will describe a new DMD-based design for a headlight that can be programmed to perform several tasks simultaneously and that can sense, react and adapt quickly to any environment with the goal of increasing safety for all drivers on the road. For example, we will be able to drive with high-beams without glaring any other driver and we will be able to see better during rain and snowstorms when the road is most treacherous to drive. The headlight can also increase contrast of lanes, markings and sidewalks and can alert drivers to sudden obstacles. In this talk, we will lay out the engineering challenges in building this headlight and share our experiences with the prototypes developed over the past two years.