Blog

When creating or designing a product, engineers spend an awful lot of time sitting at their desk working on a computer.  The focus of this work is using computer aided design (CAD), to speed up the planning process and to minimize errors. CAD technology allows us to bring a product to market faster.

If you were to make an analogy between a radar and the human body, the antenna on the radar would be the eyes – it sees what the radar detects. There are many different antenna types that exist today and these technologies are continually growing and becoming more complex. The technologies range from the dipole antenna (2 wires), to patch antennas and, most recently, metamaterial antennas that could, in the far future, provide a method for cloaking. Cloaking, in the context of metamaterial cloaking and electromagnetic (EM) radiation, is when the EM field propagates around the object with the metamaterial properties, or in other words it makes the object seem invisible. Aren’t antennas cool?

They say never cry wolf. But what happens when there is actually a wolf? Safety technology is hitting the heavy-duty vehicle industry in spades. The ability to protect blind spots using object detection technology—no matter the working or weather conditions—is a real lifesaver for heavy-duty vehicles in any environment.

Now, when an alarm goes off that indicates something is in the way, it’s a clear call to action. Or rather, non-action. It’s a signal to stop, and do a safety check. But what if the radar’s field of view is too wide or too long—and the alert goes off too often—for relatively insignificant objects? The never cry wolf effect will set in, and that can lead to complacency.