SBCE Student's Innovative Design - Automatic Automobile Headlight Dimmer System

One of the main causes of accidents during night driving is the bright head lights of vehicles. It cause temporary blindness in the driver coming from the opposite direction. It is due to a phenomenon called “Troxler” effect. Hence, drivers are advised to use dim mode of their headlights at night when vehicles come in opposite direction. But in reality most of the drivers show a hesitation to obey this traffic rule, leading to fatal accidents. Anticipating such behavior, some of the high-end vehicles presently have an automatic headlight dimmer system, which also increases the drivers' comfort while driving.

Unfortunately the low/mid-level vehicles which make up the majority on the road don’t have such a system when introduced. Also the available off-the-shelf dimmer systems in the market are either too expensive or incompatible with these models, due to which their owners wear away from using them.

Looking into these factors a few UG-PG students of the Electrical Engineering Dept. of Sree Buddha college of Engineering, Pattoor have developed an affordable automatic headlight dimmer system that can be used in existing vehicles also. This system automatically identifies an approaching vehicle from the opposite direction from almost 50 m away and switches the headlight to dim mode until that vehicle has passed.

The main features of this system are

• Its affordable price which is almost 80% lesser than similar systems available in market.
• It will reduce the rate of accident in the night
• Its easy to install on even the oldest models of vehicles.

With this system on-board every vehicle, the inventors feel that at least 20% of the accidents happening at night can be reduced, saving precious lives. This automatic automobile headlight dimmer system has been invented by Bibin Thankachan & Anoop J. R. (M-Tech) and Chippy Bose, Liya P J & Tessa Joshua (final year B-Tech) under the guidance of Assistant Professor, Dr. Mithun M. S.