AUTOMATIC HEADLIGHT BEAM INTENSITY SWITCHER

Abstract

The evolution in the technology of automobiles has reached its peak. One of the most innovative features is the invention of driver less car or an autonomous car. An autonomous car controls the motion, sensor activation and action automatically without any human intervention. Such vehicles ensure high degree of safety, comfort and ease of driving. The project aims at designing a system to be used in such autonomous cars. The project is to develop an automatic headlight beam intensity switcher. Such a system will sense the beam status of opposing vehicle and switch the beam intensity of headlight. A sensor based mechanism is utilized to develop the system. The beam intensity switcher plays a very important role while driving. During night time, when two vehicles approach each other in opposite direction the high intensity headlight creates an effect called “Troxler effect”. This effect creates a temporary blindness for some seconds thus resulting in unfortunate accidents. Thus, the high beam of both the vehicles must be switched to low so as to have a comfortable driving. The use of such a device in cars can prevent accidents at night time due to driver inattentiveness and provides an ease of driving. We have used the Arduino UNO board as our microcontroller and application specific sensors. In our project we have designed a device which is a combination of software and hardware coding. The sensor used is a light intensity sensor named BH1750 which has a wide range of sensing capacity. The light sensor takes the “lux ” reading of the headlight rays from the opposing vehicle and checks for a threshold value assigned in the coding. Based on the threshold value the beam switches from high to low state and vice-versa when both the vehicles pass by each other. The same process takes place in opposite vehicle too. This device can be implanted on the front part of the car at an appropriate position and angle.