Crossing the road is a dangerous business. Drivers don’t always pay attention to stoplights, and many countries have crossings without stoplights, leaving pedestrians unsure whether the cars coming toward them are going to stop or not. That’s a problem Skoda, in partnership with a team of robotic experts, is tackling with a combination of smart grilles and AI crossing guards.
Skoda’s contribution to the project is focused on a digital grille that can display messages visible to those outside the car. That technology would have been hard to implement on a combustion-powered car that needs a traditional open grille for cooling, but it works perfectly on an EV like Skoda’s Enyaq.
The prototype grille has built-in LED strips that replace the Enyaq’s ‘Crystal Face’ illuminated grille and can show pictograms or animations, including green arrows and a universally recognized green stick figure to signal to pedestrians that the car has stopped and that it is safe to cross. The car can also issue warning signals such as a warning triangle when it is about to set off to deter any late-arriving pedestrians from attempting to cross the road, or even, in the event of an emergency, let pedestrians know that it won’t be able to stop for them.
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The other half of the project involves an automated crossing guard that looks like a 7-ft (2.1 m) mobile stoplight that can monitor the people and cars around it. Developed by experts from the Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics at the Czech Technical University in Prague and the Technical University of Munich, the bot is tall enough to see over parked cars and scuttles out into the middle of the road to let pedestrians know it is safe to cross.
Symbols on its four-sided digital display let both pedestrians and drivers know whose right of way it is, and the robot can also send electronic signals via 5G directly to approaching cars warning them to slow down. Once all of the waiting pedestrians have crossed safely the robot returns to the side of the road, probably to be bullied and tipped over by a bunch of bored teenagers.
The robot has so far been trialed in Milan and Modena in Italy, and Ljubljana in Slovenia but the team says the testing phase will be over in 2024 and production versions could be on the street by 2025. Skoda meanwhile isn’t talking dates for its trick grille, but since we know that other automakers including BMW and Hyundai are also working on digital grilles, we get the feeling that they’ll be regular features on almost every EV by the end of the decade.
