What better way to advance the development of crash prevention technology than to mimic some of the best proponents of collision avoidance in the natural world? Bees.
In a surprising project that will be unveiled at CEATEC, the humble bumblebee has given engineers at Nissan Motor Co.'s Advanced Technology Center a strategic hint at how to design the next generation of crash-avoidance systems.
In flight, each bee creates its own oval-shaped personal space which in fact closely resembles Nissan's Safety Shield concept.
But more crucially, it is the bee's compound eyes, capable of seeing more than 300-degrees that allows the bumblebee to fly uninterrupted inside its personal space. In order to recreate the function of a compound eye, engineers came up with the idea of a Laser Range Finder (LRF).
