Abstract
KEYWORDS: intelligent vehicles, safety, telematics
Advanced computing, sensing, and communications enable vehicles to operate automatically, to avoid accidents, and to prevent or deal with collisions. Some of the sensing systems of an potential automated vehicle are already in use: adaptive cruise control, anti-lock brakes, and in-vehicle navigation. Using components that increase safety, comfort, or convenience makes an individual vehicle intelligent. The real challenge is to combine the car´s intelligence with the existing traffic infrastructure in order to offer a complete solution. An intelligent car is not only a car that deals with electronic signals which control predefined system blocks, but also a vehicle that cooperates with the driver, and helps their to make the right decision in various traffic situations. The approach for developing intelligent cars should therefore be "human-centered" - considering the passengers in the car and the traffic members outside of it.
Wrong-way crashes are relatively infrequent but they are more likely to produce serious injuries and fatalities compared to other types of freeway crashes. These are also a source of major financial burden to the national economies and as well as having a high injury and death rate. The objective of this work is the investigation of a new measurement system for the automatic recognition of drive direction and position of moving vehicles. Of prime importance were the independence of the recognition method from external systems (like GPS, induction meander or light barrier), the simplicity of data processing, the implementation of the minimum amount of instrumentation, and the ability to update older vehicles with the new system. The signal data, collected by a fluxgate sensor, is transferred to a special ECU and is analyzed using a new method, called zoom-and-grid. The zoom-and-grid method emits digital values corresponding to the definition of the magnetic barcode, which could be applied to the road surface. These values can be used for visualization, to trigger electronic signals or they can be wirelessly transferred to a host traffic regulation system. The transfer of the output data is possible using existing wireless infrastructure like GSM/GPRS/UMTS or in a more dedicated way with shorter reaction times through specific wireless roadside telematic networks (e.g. combined with Car2Car communication) which provide a seamless connection to (fiber-optical-based) broadband access. In the near future major efforts will be put into Low-Power Wireless Sensor Networks, enabling adhoc communication, fast handover between access points and flexible topologies for redundant and secure data transmission with very few / short delay times.
We decided to develop a new intelligent measurement system whose main part is mounted in the vehicle and which uses passive marks installed on the road surface to detect the vehicle's location. This system has the following main advantages over other methods:
o no external electrical supply is required for the location marks
o the marks could be used to encode the driving direction and the car's position concurrently
o the system can be applied to the road surface of freeways and parking places or in tunnels or production halls, where radio communication cannot be guaranteed.
This system is called - Intelligent Wrong-Way Driver Recognition System with Automatic Wireless Warning Generation (WWDS).