Nighttime driving on the road could become a lot easier to do, or so at least are the plans for Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F) and Canonsburg-based Ansys Inc. (NASDAQ: ANSS). The two companies announced a collaborative effort to develop the next generation of predictive headlight technology that aims to better improve visibility while driving at night.
Currently, many vehicles Ford and other car manufacturers make come equipped with an auto-highbeam feature, which automatically turn the brightest set of a car's headlights on or off depending on the presence of other vehicles on the road, as well as other factors.
Ford is looking to take automatic headlight adaptability even further by designing a system that incorporates location data so lights can adjust and "see" around corners before the vehicle even approaches a bend in the road.
The automaker said it will incorporate Ansys' advanced high fidelity, physics-based AVxcelerate Headlamp lighting simulation technology to test such lighting concepts, an effort that Ansys said will save Ford money and time because its software will allow Ford to cut down on the need for more expensive physical testing of the product. Ford will then be able to rely on insights gained from the simulations so it can better improve the product's design before it even makes physical headlamp prototypes featuring the technology.
"The predictive accuracy of Ansys simulations yield a variety of significant benefits for our team, from being able to engineer for edge case scenarios to less late-night road tests," Michael Koherr, advanced lighting research engineer at Ford, said in a statement. "With the ability to truly gauge system performance in a virtual environment, we're able to identify opportunities to improve our product well before entering the physical testing stage. Simulation has and will continue to play a critical role in our quest of making driving at night as safe and easy as during the day."
Ansys's partnership with Ford marks the second collaboration in recent weeks that it has made with a large company. In early October, Apple Inc. picked Ansys for the development of a new streamlined certification process for developers who are looking to make products using Apple's MagSafe magnetic charging technology. Ansys's cloud-based solution aims to reduce costs for MagSafe developers by eliminating the need for physical prototypes or the need to use radio frequency safety certification software when creating MagSafe-equipped devices.
