SoftBank Corp and Honda R&D teamed to test the effectiveness of using standalone (SA) 5G and a cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) system to reduce collisions between pedestrians and vehicles, with the aim of linking the two systems by end-March 2022.

Using a SoftBank SA 5G experimental base station installed at a Honda testing site and the latter’s recognition technology, the companies are conducting verifications for a number of use cases.

One involves a vehicle sending an alert to a pedestrian’s mobile device directly or through a multi-access edge computing (MEC) server when an on-board camera recognises the risk of a collision.

Another involves vehicles checking for nearby mobile devices to glean information on hidden pedestrians and informing both of the other’s presence. When a second vehicle is in a position to see the person on foot, it notifies the other vehicle.

A third scenario is exploring vehicles sharing information about areas with poor visibility with an MEC server, which organises the data and notifies other nearby vehicles.

The companies started joint research on connected car technologies using a 5G network in late 2017.