What does it mean automotive situational awareness ?

For a pilot, situational awareness means having a mental picture of the existing inter-relationship of location, flight conditions, configuration and energy state of your aircraft as well as any other factors that could be about to affect its safety such as proximate terrain, obstructions..........

For a vehicle, situational awareness means understanding the surrounding around the vehicle 360 degrees in real time, this mean knowing the coordinates(longitude/latitude) of our own host vehicle, the coordinates of lanes around the vehicle, which is most important in junctions through using HD-maps, knowing or receiving accurate location of vehicles around host vehicle, or recognizing them through "visual" sensors.

This situational awareness is what "visual" sensors try to achieve- understanding the surrounding around the vehicle without success due to many limitations of physics related to cameras(very hard to recognize objects, distance to them and their exact place, radars(work in any weather, don't recognize objects, calculate distance to objects very accurately) and Lidars(work badly in rain, many problems with recognizing objects). Visual sensors work only when there is Line of Sight to the object- meaning no obstruction to the object. Visual sensors(except radar) also work poorly in bad weather, sophisticated hardware and wires to install in vehicle, cleaning/cooling/warming the sensors, GPU software that has many problems recognizing objects from data that comes from sensors.

This is how situational awareness can be seen:

or in this simulation(Using coordinates of real HD-map by "HERE Technologies" in Berlin/Germany):

This simulation of situation awareness shows real coordinates in Berlin, show the capabilities of sending location of host vehicle to HD-map that includes lanes, host vehicle in center of HD-map, and several other vehicles broadcasting their location between each other.

This technology requires 5G NR deployment of antennas on ground, no need for GPS/GNSS satellites localization that is dependent on good weather and have weak accuracy to achieve the localization level that is needed by using 5G V2X modem, and C-V2X broadcasting capabilities of V2X modem to broadcast location of vehicle to other vehicles around, now after that we get Situation awareness by integrating data from HD-map tiles with location of host vehicle and vehicles moving around our host vehicle that broadcasted their location.

Now, what are the benefits of using this technology:

1.Safety: testing speed of own vehicle and other vehicles around using HD-map speed limitation capabilities, since dynamic HD-map easily checks own vehicle and other vehicle speed, we can call it dynamic police system in each and every vehicle in real time.

2.Safety: like collision detection using path planning of all vehicles on top of the hd-map, since there is knowledge of place of each vehicle and it's path planning(broadcasting of movement between lanes using C-V2X, broadcasting of turn right/left/ move ahead before junction using C-V2X).

3. Autonomous movement: once host vehicle has the knowledge of HD-map lane coordinates and where it is located inside the HD-map: lane group/lane/lane segment, calculating the speed/azimuth of the vehicle, and corresponding wheel change inside the host vehicle is easy.

4. Platooning: movement of several vehicles together in a synchronized way to solve traffic congestion problems.

All this software capabilities come after there is good knowledge of location of own vehicle that works in any weather(5G NR), and broadcasting capabilities of C-V2X that is part of 5G, into situational awareness items 1,2,3,4 written above. Using sensors to achieve situation awareness that works in any weather and can see only when there is line of sight, does not give the level of situation awareness seen in the simulations above, that receive real data from V2X modems.

Welcome to Smart Cities and 5G and capabilities that will never achieved by sensors, that work in every weather, no need to clean/cool/warm sensors, no need for sophisticated hardware, no need for AI that uses funny neural networks, there is a need for 5G antennas on road, and V2V modems inside vehicle. that's all.

There is now a transition in the automotive world from sensors->Smart Cities, this is the only solution that will work.

Every one reading this, especially OEM's/Tier 1 people, is welcome to ask more questions.