Wabco Partnerships Aimed at Advancing Autonomous Vehicle Tech

Wabco Holdings is collaborating with Peloton Technology and Mobileye to advance the company’s autonomous vehicle technologies, the company announced at the IAA Commercial Vehicle Show in Hannover, Germany. 

Wabco is working with Peloton to advance an innovative solution for truck platooning, integrated commercial vehicle-to-vehicle communication and other automation technologies to improve safety and fuel efficiency.

By electronically linking two or more trucks and forming a virtual road train on highways, platooning increases fuel economy for each truck. Wabco will contribute to this concept with its portfolio of braking, advanced stability and emergency braking systems, including predictive cruise control. Peloton will bring its proprietary platooning technologies that are currently under testing in the U.S.

Wabco’s OnGuardActive collision mitigation system is important to vehicles connected in a platoon. When necessary, it provides active braking to avoid or mitigate impending rear-end collisions.

Peloton’s systems enable platooning through advanced vehicle-to-vehicle wireless communication, enabling tractor-trailers to accelerate and brake together and safely operate at closer distances to gain aerodynamic efficiencies. Peloton’s Network Operations Center supervises the platooning trucks, allowing platooning only where, when and how it is safe to do so.

Peloton’s system also processes real-time data gathered from sensors linked to other vehicle's active safety and automation systems, including Wabco’s OnGuard emergency braking system and from data about the vehicle’s systems and their performance.

“Today’s announcement builds on our past work together, and we continue to be excited about the synergy with Wabco, a global technology leader in advanced driver assistance and active safety systems,” said Josh Switkes, Peloton CEO and founder. “Working with Wabco, we can make trucks and drivers safer on highways whether in a platoon or operating individually.”

Wabco has also signed an agreement with an automotive industry supplier based in Asia to bring active steering and other technologies to the commercial industry through a new joint venture. The joint venture will leverage Wabco’s braking, vehicle control and advanced driver assistance systems expertise with its partner’s steering system technology and capabilities. This integration will result in innovation for advanced safety-enabling solutions that support automated driving through intelligent control of both the longitudinal and lateral movements of vehicles.

Wabco has also teamed up with Mobileye, a company that designs advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous driving technologies. The two companies intend to develop systems for commercial vehicles that will combine Mobileye’s REM vision system and mapping technology with control and actuation technologies from Wabco. The collaboration is aimed at producing more advanced safety capability to reduce the risk of accidents.

Mobileye’s REM technology provides real-time data for precise localization and high-definition lane data. REM data from the vision system in vehicles will be integrated with real-time data from Wabco’s technologies about the vehicle’s systems and performance. All of the data will be streamed for cloud-based computing and off-vehicle data analytics support.

“The inclusion of our innovative REM technology into the WABCO-Mobileye system further enhances its capabilities and creates a system with a high degree of safety for the benefit of commercial vehicle manufacturers and operators,” said Ziv Aviram, Mobileye co-founder, president and CEO.