Indian Working On Next-gen ARAS

Front and rear radar developed for group riding.

In general, the Chieftain PowerPlus has quality fit and finish. Panels between the bags and rear fender sort of feel like an afterthought, though, and the plastic beauty covers partially hiding the frame behind the rear cylinder are, well, plastic. Is the fit and finish as quality as the competition’s? We’ll let you be the judge.Indian Motorcycle

Advanced Riding Assistance Systems (ARAS) are one of the hottest areas of motorcycle development at the moment, following technologies like ABS and traction control making the leap from cars to two wheels. After having launched its first radar-equipped models for 2025, Indian is now working on a much more advanced version of the idea.

The Chieftain PowerPlus Dark Horse comes standard with Indian’s Rider Assist package that includes the rear-facing radar, seen just above the license plate.Indian Motorcycle

Indian’s Rider Assist package, which comes as part of the 112ci PowerPlus pack on certain 2025 models, includes a rear-facing radar that enables the sort of blind-spot monitoring system that most of us have probably already experienced in cars, as well as a slightly more motorcycle-specific tailgating warning when a vehicle gets too close behind. But it’s barely scratching the surface of the possibilities that modern ARAS presents. Since 2020, a variety of manufacturers, led by BMW, KTM, Kawasaki, and Yamaha, all with Bosch-developed kit, have offered front radars as well as rear-facing units, introducing the possibility of adaptive cruise control to keep pace with traffic, and crash mitigating auto-braking systems.

More recently we’ve seen the same systems paired with auto or semi-auto transmissions, allowing the adaptive cruise to operate all the way down to a standstill, mirroring the kit on many modern cars, but so far motorcycles haven’t followed cars down the route of offering lane-keeping assist systems. But that’s something that Indian is now working on.

A combination of front and rear radar, and four cameras can give Indian’s system a much clearer view of what’s around the motorcycle.Indian Motorcycle

Indian is not alone. We’ve previously seen patents from companies like Honda and Yamaha showing they’re developing lane assist for motorcycles, whether via warnings alone or with the added complexity of steering assist to get riders back on track if they start to stray. But Indian’s latest patent application illustrates how motorcycles need to approach the idea of lane assist from a different angle, since for us a single lane can really offer more than one potential riding line. To add another layer of complexity, the radars and cameras that the systems use aren’t mounted on a stable platform, but one that leans through corners, making it much more difficult to track the bike’s exact position between the lane markings.

Indian’s future system, as illustrated in its latest patent, involves two radars—one front, one rear—and four cameras: front, rear, and one on each side. Between them, they keep an eye on the bike’s position in relation to the road markings and other vehicles, but also constantly update the area that they monitor in relation to the bike’s position between the white lines.

Indian is tackling the variable that motorcycles can be positioned anywhere between the white lines.Indian Motorcycle

While a car’s driver assistance system only needs to monitor a box around the vehicle, its edges defined by the lane markings and the range of the front and rear radars, the Indian system is designed to monitor a narrow area in front and behind, as well as a section to each side that changes depending whether you’re riding to the left of the lane, to the right of the lane, or straight down the middle. It’s particularly important in the context of group riding, with the narrow front and rear beams allowing riders to adopt a staggered pattern without constantly triggering each other’s ARAS warnings. It sounds complicated, but the patent illustrations show how the idea would work in practice.

Group riding in a staggered position can throw off less complex systems. Indian’s will account for this issue.Indian Motorcycle

By combining the system with the sort of lean sensors and accelerometers that are already commonplace thanks to modern inertial measurement units, Indian proposes that the shape of the monitored area could also be changed when the bike is cornering, predicting its curved path and basing alerts or adaptive cruise control on that area rather than the one directly in front.

The fact that motorcycles lean changes how the radar reads the area ahead of and behind a motorcycle. Indian will also develop its radar to account for this.Indian Motorcycle

Indian has already been working on systems like these for several years—we first saw a patent front, rear, and side monitoring from the company way back in 2021—but the introduction of a rear radar in the 2025 model range shows there’s finally a real step toward getting these concepts into production, and the latest patent indicates the direction that the technology is likely to take in the future.

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