Abstract

The current design paradigm of car cabin components assumes seats aligned with the driving direction. All passengers are aligned with the driver that, until recently, was the only element in charge of controlling the vehicle. The new paradigm of self-driving cars eliminates several of those requirements, releasing the driver from control duties and creating new opportunities for entertaining the passengers during the trip. This creates the need for controlling functionalities that must be closer to each user, namely on the seat. This work proposes the use of low-cost capacitive touch sensors for controlling car functions, multimedia controls, seat orientation, door windows, and others. In the current work, we have reached a proof of concept that is functional, as shown for several cabin functionalities. The proposed concept can be adopted by current car manufacturers without changing the automobile construction pipeline. It is flexible and can adopt a variety of new functionalities, mostly software-based, added by the manufacturer, or customized by the end-user. Moreover, the newly proposed technology uses a smaller number of plastic parts for producing the component, which implies savings in terms of production cost and energy, while increasing the life cycle of the component.

Highlights

  • Recent advances in self-driving cars are expected to translate into a significant number of new vehicles circulating using this new paradigm in the coming years [1,2]

  • Where previously there was a need to match the amount of general-purpose input/output (GPIO) of the microcontroller to the number of sensors employed using the “Self-Capacitance” [15] design previously explained how we further reduced the number of GPIOs needed using a design called

  • In this paper we address this change of paradigm in the sense that we propose new low-cost and easy to implement touch-based models for controlling car cabin functionalities

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Summary

Introduction

Recent advances in self-driving cars are expected to translate into a significant number of new vehicles circulating using this new paradigm in the coming years [1,2]. Many works state that by 2050 self-driving cars will dominate, which creates new opportunities and new challenges [3]. In this context, the human driver will likely be released from functions, offloading that responsibility to the machine and artificial intelligence algorithms [4,5]. There may no longer exist a clear separation of the passengers the way we have it today due to the transmission tunnel on the cockpit’s floor In this context, it is possible that a brand differentiator may well consist of the interior design of the car cabin, namely the seat arrangement and orientation, as well as the floor of the car cabin [7,8]

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