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Autonomous vehicles must guarantee safety in all road conditions, including driving on wet roads. Aquaplaning (or hydroplaning) is a phenomenon known since the beginning of automotive history, never solved by an active safety system. Currently, no countermeasure system on the market is able to effectively counteract aquaplaning: ABS, ESP or TCS are still inefficient in overcoming this situation. Latest statistical data confirm that the higher percentage of accidents, injuries and deaths are caused by wet road conditions. The aquaplaning happens when the water on the road is too much and the tires start to float causing the instantaneous loss of control. Such phenomenon occurs in human-driven vehicles, with the responsibility of the driver, but in autonomous vehicles (e.g. Level 5), the responsibility for the safety depends on the car and the reduction of the speed is not a solution. In this work, it is presented the second version of our anti-aquaplaning active safety system, which can identify, without any new sensor, if the vehicle is subject to aquaplaning. When the software detects the phenomenon, the hydraulic system, designed to have a very short reaction time, makes an intelligent injection of water in front of the tires restoring the adherence of any type of vehicle (human-driven or autonomous) in a few milliseconds. It will also be shown how the system could be integrated with sensorized tires (tested for the first time in the automotive history). Moreover, the effects coming from the synergy between the system, ADAS and 5G technology will finally be highlighted in terms of improvements for the future smart mobility.
Blandina et al. (Sun,) studied this question.