Platform enabling intelligent safety applications for vulnerable road users

Abstract

In 2009, 9108 vulnerable road users (VRUs; pedestrians and bicyclists) died in the EU and 4722 in the US. Active safety systems, that is intelligent systems able to predict and prevent crashes, may significantly help to reduce VRU fatalities and injuries; however, current active safety systems for VRUs are only found on high-end vehicles, only support the host vehicle driver, and do not make use of wireless communication. The scope of this study is to describe the set-up and realworld verification of a platform to enable active safety systems for VRU. This platform is carried by VRUs and may support multiple road users using wireless communication. A simple conceptual application, addressing pedestrian safety at crossings, was developed to test the platform. This application was not cooperative (i.e. did not support multiple road users with wireless communication). The results presented in this study suggest that such a platform can be employed (i) as a logger for naturalistic studies on VRUs, (ii) to better understand VRU behaviour and accident causation and (iii) as a basis for the development of novel active safety applications, running on portable devices, such as future generation smart phones, and possibly enabled by wireless communication.

Automated analysis of pedestrian walking behaviour at a signalised intersection in China

“…Finally, one long term research objectives is to explore the integration of such automated data collection in modern intelligent transportation systems applications. In particular, collision avoidance and safety monitoring applications can greatly benefit of the automatic identification of violators [59][60][61]. The results in this paper, can also be used during the calibration of pedestrian simulation models [62,63].…”

V-Alert: Description and Validation of a Vulnerable Road User Alert System in the Framework of a Smart City

“…Applications like [10,11,12] have been configured based on data interchange between vehicles and VRU using nomad devices, but using, in all the cases, short-range communications platforms and not combining short- and long-range links like in V-Alert, providing more coverage area and then, more reaction time for drivers and VRUs. In other cases, these approaches are not considered cooperative applications due to not supporting multiple road users with communication availability.…”

Understanding Bicycle Dynamics and Cyclist Behavior From Naturalistic Field Data (November 2012)

“…In addition, as new modes of transportation, such as electric bicycles and mopeds, increasingly enter the market, field data studies such as ours may contribute to the understanding of the tradeoff between safety and mobility that the evolving split across means of transport induces. The platform [38] used in this study to collect data from bicycles could be used to collect naturalistic data from electric bicycles or mopeds as well, thus guiding the development of novel intelligent transport systems.…”