Honda shows its Autonomous Work Vehicle at CES 2019

I was at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas last month. What a cool event! There was a lot of amazing stuff on display. However, Honda’s Autonomous Work Vehicle really caught my eye.

A prototype off-road vehicle, this four-wheel drive quad bike can transport supplies, equipment and water to hard-to-reach locations – sans driver.

The vehicle features GPS and sensor-based autonomy capable of guiding the unit in almost any environment, a rail accessory mount system for limitless accessories and attachments and onboard power plug-ins.

This wasn’t the global launch of the Autonomous Work Vehicle. It was actually first seen at the 2018 CES (it bore the code name of 3E-D18 back then). The big news, however, is that it’s been involved in numerous pilot projects.

For instance, it has been tested at a large-scale solar operations company in North Carolina, a wildland firefighting division in Colorado and an agricultural and environmental sciences college in California.

Honda also demonstrated Safe Swarm technology at the CES this year. In a nutshell, Safe Swarm is a concept that demonstrates Honda’s dream to realise a collision-free society through safe and smooth traffic flow using connected-vehicle technologies.

Using Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) technology, Honda Safe Swarm allows vehicles to communicate with surrounding vehicles and share key information such as location and speed.

With this information, along with the sensor suite on the vehicle, the driver or automated vehicle systems can determine the safest course of action in merging with traffic or avoiding a road hazard.

Ultimately, Honda believes that connecting all road users will create a safer transportation environment, mitigating and eventually eliminating all traffic fatalities. Methinks it sounds like a great idea.