Crook-to-crook communication

Inter-vehicle communication enhances the ability of the vehicle and the driver to perceive and react to the environment around them. For example, wireless communication could alert drivers of each other even in situations where they are unable to see each other directly, such at a blind intersection.

Unfortunately, some traffic participants don't always want to be seen. Law enforcement setting up speed checks often want an element of surprise. The idea being that drivers will stick to the speed limits as they don't know if a speed check is coming up. A french company, Coyote, has a system based on centralized wireless communication that allows drivers to easily "tag" locations where they observe speed checks, effectively warning other drivers to slow down, or conversely reassuring them that they can speed otherwise. According to this article they already have a user base of 250.000 subscribers in France.

This is not completely new, you have been able to download point-of-interest (POI) databases of automatic traffic cameras for quite some time, but the dynamic nature of users submitting tags is a new twist. I wonder if the French police can turn this to their favor by analyzing the lag in user feedback loop. If it is possible to set up speed checks at a rate faster than the Coyote system can invalidate old warnings they could in fact appear to be at multiple locations simultaneously. Another exploit could be to inject bogus data into the Coyote system, however I guess some type of reputation system might be employed to stop such malicious users.

Update: Someone also pointed out that there are other services like this that do not rely on specialized hardware, rather take advantage of the fact that most modern cell phones contain positioning devices, e.g. Trapster.com

I spy ice spy

Continental Corporation introduced "Ice Spy" in a recent press release. From the press release:

"Hanover, February 2009 – In the cold months of the year, black ice surprises motorists time and again. This is clearly reflected in the accident statistics. According to the Federal Office of Statistics, black ice and snow or ice were at the root of 5,230 accidents involving personal injury in 2007. To prevent drivers from being caught unawares by the danger, the international automotive supplier Continental is working on bringing an intelligent early-warning system to production readiness. The system will warn drivers following behind a vehicle so equipped of icy road conditions up ahead"

Although a bit vague on the details, the system utilizes temperature sensors to detect ice when the vehicle passes over it. Black ice is especially tricky for motorists as it is highly transparent which makes it hard to detect as this video illustrates.



The press release mentions that slippery conditions can already today be detected by analyzing the vehicle dynamics, I assume for example wheel slip. Coincidentally, today I also read a paper from the Finnish technical research center VTT on the topic of ice and water detection:

Kutila, M. "Road State Monitoring for Cooperative Traffic Safety System." Scientific activities in transport telematics 2008, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. p. 24-27. Download report

Their approach is based on the fact that light reflected off of ice or water has less horizontal polarization. Using near-infrared cameras and image analysis they show that ice and water can be detected in front of the vehicle.

Detecting slippery conditions before passing over them is of course preferable to detecting it when you're on top of it, Continental's sensors does not provide this by themselves. However this is where car-to-car communication comes in:

"In the future, car-to-car (C2C) systems will provide valuable service in enabling vehicles to communicate with other vehicles and with the traffic infrastructure. It will make it possible for a vehicle detecting black ice to inform the vehicle behind it of this danger.”

Both Continental and VTT are part of the SAFESPOT project that investigates cooperative safety services.

Java e-call

The following seems to have been picked up by a few tech sites and ended up in my news feed this morning.

It seems to be based on a paper published by D. Acharya et.al. titled: "SAVE: a wireless Java enabled automobile accident reporting system" in the International Journal of Intelligent Defence Support Systems.

Since I don't have access to that particular journal I took a look at a similarly titled paper from the same authors over at IEEEXplore

Basically the idea seems to be to distribute a number of small wireless sensor nodes (SunSPOTs) in a vehicle in order to detect crashes, and then notify proper authorities post-crash. The idea of post-crash notification is certainly not new and many such systems are already found on the market, however these are according to the authors typically vehicle-dependent.

Installing after-market e-call systems could perhaps be a business idea, considering for example what happened with the personal navigation device (PND) market. The ability to take your PND with you when you leave your car is a big advantage. As others mentioned, most of the sensors necessary for crash detection already exist in your average smartphone, personally I would like an e-call device that calls the paramedics no matter if I crash in my car, fall off my bicycle or off of a cliff when hiking.