Volvo's attractive proposition for magnets to keep cars in lane

The low-cost magnets could eventually be used to augment safety systems such as GPS and cameras in autonomous vehicles, Jonas Ekmark preventive safety leader at Volvo Car Group told The Engineer.

The idea to use permanent magnets as a positional aid came from an American project in the 1990s.

He said: ‘What we’ve done…is another implementation of it using less expensive magnets, less expensive sensors and…microcontrollers to see whether we can get it to a reasonable cost level and still achieve reasonable performance.

‘We think of the magnet system as [providing] additional information that makes the positioning system of the vehicle more reliable and dependable, but not as a single source [for positioning].

‘We’d use it together with GPS and [an] inertial measurement system and wheel rotation sensors and possibly a detailed map that is correlated with sensors like radar and cameras in order to have a really high precision, dependable positioning system.’