Japanese carmaker Honda revealed that it has invested around $5 million in Canesta's electronic perception technology, and has plans to the technology to introduce new automotive safety applications like collision avoidance.
Reading out a statement, the head of Honda Strategic Venturing, Toshinori Arita said, "It provides a comparatively low-cost, chip-based 3-D 'camera' that could serve multiple applications from a single installation". The company said that the image sensors developed by Canesta could be placed in bodywork, trim or in a vehicle dashboard.
The technology gives a vehicle the ability to "sense" the space between nearby objects and the output is displayed in a stream of 3-D image data. This is done by studying the time taken by the radio waves, generated by an antenna, traveling from the car to the object and then being bounced back. Smart sensors then convert the time taken by a wave to come back, into a pixel. The image and distance information is then studied by an on-chip processor, which uses Canesta's proprietary imaging software, to sharpen the 3-D image representation.
Canesta president Jim Spare said that the technology is still in its testing phase adding that the key component is the sensor. "The key innovation is that we don't have to do any processing of the data (on a microprocessor) to create a 3D image. The sensor calculates the distances. The microprocessor is used only for application processing. Is this a pedestrian or a tree?” Spare said.
The electronic perception technology is being touted as the next big thing and there are as many as 17 patents already. One of the pioneers of the technology, Canesta was founded in 1999 and has revealed that it has investments over $44 million and its clients include JP Morgan Partners, Korea Global IT Fund and Venrock Associates.
