Occupant monitoring system: Child detection and robo-taxi push toward full-cabin intelligence

This is a major shift for the automotive industry. As vehicles become more software-defined and automated, automakers can no longer treat cabin safety as a purely mechanical problem. The car now needs perception inside the cabin, not just outside it.

For most of automotive history, the inside of a vehicle has been treated as a passive safety space. Seats held people in place. Seatbelts restrained them. Airbags protected them in a crash. Beyond that, the car had only a limited idea of who was inside or what was happening after the doors closed. That is changing.