burnthesheep wrote:
Thoughts?
There's a ton of work going on in this area. Hundreds of millions of dollars for this specific problem. I can't go into detail due to NDAs.
The work covers a few different methods. Once is passive detection of cyclists/pedestrians using stereo vision, lidar, or radar already on cars. (no special electronics on the bike, though possibly non-electronic stuff). Another is active emission from bikes/pedestrians to assist the stereo/lidar/radar - I assume this active emission is what you meant referring to the Varia? And the third is just vehicle-to-vehicle communication (considering bikes a "vehicle"). E.g. if your GPS head unit knows its location/velocity/heading, it can tell all approaching cars approximately where it is (within GPS/sensor accuracy).
A lot of it is nearly read to roll out. The reason it's taking so long is though while it's "easy" to get all the stuff working 99% of the time, it has to be better than that when people's lives are on the line. Mis-communication or bad reading giving the wrong location of the bike can be worse than no information at all.
Some of it requires foundational technologies to roll-out. For example vehicle-to-vehicle comms using a 5G-like network are going to have to be standardized, and that's still a work in progress. Things like WiFi or Bluetooth won't cut it.