Continental Cabin Sensing: interior sensors for design & safety!

Continental has developed an integrated solution for interior sensors in order to meet the safety standards of the future today and to further increase comfort in the vehicle. For so-called cabin sensing, the technology company combines its many years of know-how around the importance of interior cameras for human-machine interaction with profound expertise in the field of radar sensors. With the object detection of the entire vehicle interior in real time, Continental goes beyond pure driver monitoring and thus offers another building block for future mobility models such as automated or autonomous driving. The technology meets future safety regulations of the European Commission and the consumer protection organization European New Car Assessment Program (Euro NCAP).

Continental cabin sensing

“For our new approach to interior sensor technology, we not only bundled the expertise from various areas, but also mastered several technical challenges at the same time. For the first time, we are integrating the camera directly into the display instead of in the steering column or the instrument cluster. To do this, we are relying on extreme miniaturization of the technology, which opens up completely new opportunities for us in terms of positioning, ”says Ulrich Lüders, Head of Strategy and Portfolio in the Human Machine Interface business unit at Continental.

The complexity of this technology lies, on the one hand, in integrating the optics and sensors, which have been minimized to around ten millimeters, exactly and completely into the display, so that the highest demands on aesthetics and design are met. On the other hand, in the precise positioning of the radar sensor, which must ensure that all areas of the interior can be covered equally. The combination of both technologies as well as the exact integration and positioning enables various applications for cabin sensing to be developed.

The car becomes a smart watch

The Continental solution reliably detects living objects in the vehicle, regardless of whether they are adults, children or animals. This is particularly important with a view to future safety standards, as Lüders explains: "With our Cabin Sensing solution, we meet the new requirements of the EU General Safety Regulation (GSR) and also support automobile manufacturers in scoring points in the Euro NCAP."

From 2024, the European Commission will prescribe systems for driver and vehicle monitoring for new approvals in the type approval requirements of the GSR, for example to detect fatigue or lack of attention on the part of the driver. These far-reaching legislative changes are accompanied by another regulatory driver: The Euro NCAP organization will reward the installation of indoor camera systems with points as early as 2023. In particular, the voluntary program for assessing vehicle safety plans to award assessment points for recognizing children in the future (child presence detection, CPD). If parents forget their child in the back seat, the cabin sensing technology recognizes this through the radar sensor and the stored algorithms for object classification and sounds the alarm.

“The focus of our development was on the detection of living objects. To do this, our cabin sensing detects the child's breathing, among other things, identifying them as a living person and sounding the alarm. False warnings are almost impossible, ”explains Daniel Naujack, Product Manager Interior Camera & Cabin Sensing at Continental. "On the basis of the image information from the interior camera, the system can also recognize items of luggage left behind and sends a notification to the owner's cell phone if, for example, he has forgotten a briefcase in the rental car."

In the future, cabin sensing from Continental will be able to record and evaluate other health parameters in addition to object movements, such as pulse, breathing rate or body temperature. If the system detects a health emergency, it can then bring the vehicle to a safe stop using a so-called minimum risk maneuver. "With the collection of various vital data through cabin sensing, we will turn the car into a passenger's smart watch in the future," summarizes Naujack.

Essential element in automated driving

On the way to autonomous driving, interior sensors play another important role. So there will always be traffic situations that require that the driving task is passed back to the driver by the automated system. Making this handover safe is a crucial task that self-driving cars have to master. Coupled with sensor information and software, an interior camera can detect whether a driver is even able to take back manual control. “Automated driving enables the driver to do different things in his car without having to concentrate on the traffic. The system must therefore be able to recognize whether the driver is lost in a book or even asleep so that the return of the driving task is successful and safe, ”says Naujack. In the field of autonomous driving, cabin sensing also plays an important role so that robo-taxis, for example, always know how their passengers are doing.

Of course, that wasn't the end of it!

tuningblog has countless other articles on the subject of car and auto tuning in stock. Do you want to see them all? Just click HERE and look around. In part, we would like to provide you with news but also off the tuning. In our category Tips, products, information & Co We have reviews of car or accessories manufacturers, new ones Tuning Wiki Terms or one or the other Leak veröffentlicht. Following an excerpt of the last articles:

"Tuningblog.eu" - we keep you up to date on the subject of car tuning and car styling with our tuning magazine and we present you the latest tuned vehicles from all over the world every day. It's best to subscribe to ours Feed and will automatically be informed as soon as there is something new about this post, and of course also to all other contributions.