Handwriting Letter Recognition on the Steering Wheel Switches

Automotive steering wheel switches technologies are evolving to give easy access to the several interior or exterior functions. This is worth a deep analysis for the current trends in order not to become unintuitive for the driver due to the increasing number of buttons. Through different technologies particularly the capacitive ones, range of innovative solutions have been developed like reconfigurable buttons on the steering wheel to offer commanding several functions twice or triple the number of allocated push buttons. In this paper, we address the problem in a different freely way to offer a wide band-use for the existing functions by developing handwriting letter recognition on the capacitive touch switches acting as touch pads. This approach relies on in-house acquired dataset in its algorithms. This significantly increases the interface capabilities and eases the access to the different functions like ADAS, infotainment, phone, etc. without having to take hands off the wheel. The interest of this solution is a modern access for the steering wheel switches and easy management for configuring the different functions. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.