Featuring the company’s longitudinal and lateral vehicle control expertise, and combined with Mobileye’s advanced EyeQ4 processor, ZF announced Wednesday plans to release its two lens camera specifically designed for the commercial truck market next year.
Smaller than most commercial vehicle cameras on the market due to a flexible and compact mechanical design, Dual-cam is part of ZF’s S-Cam4 family of automotive grade cameras. Dual-Cam’s second lens enables redundancy because if one lens becomes blinded or non-functional the second helps ensure the camera can still operate due to multiple optical paths, allowing for Level 2 and above SAE autonomous driving with a wider angle field of view.
ZF’s Head of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and Autonomy for Commercial Truck applications Dan Williams says the Dual-cam is designed to meet varying global regulatory requirements while delivering advanced functions such as Traffic Sign Recognition, Lane Keeping Assist and Centering and object and pedestrian detection to enable Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB).
To help ensure these technologies work effectively on commercial trucks, Williams says a second lens is necessary for some of the more advanced functions.
“For example, for pedestrian AEB in some instances a standard mono-camera with a 52-degree field can limit the ability to detect pedestrians or other vulnerable road users with enough time to actuate the brakes and help avoid or mitigate accidents for larger trucks in complex environments,” he says.
ZF’s camera technologies feature best-in-class optical performance and an enhanced fusion envelope. When combined with a full suite of the company’s ADAS technologies such as forward looking and corner radar, automated functions such as lane change assist, and traffic jam assist are enabled. These functions can form the basis for technologies such as truck platooning to make long haul trucking safer and more efficient.
ZF has a history of supplying commercial truck ADAS for European truck makers and will launch an advanced ADAS system for a Japanese manufacturer in 2020. The launch will include ZF’s first application for its Image Processing Module where camera images will be processed in a separate unit from the camera housing.
