ITS Paralysis?

There's an interesting article over at CNN Tech about the rollout of ITS in South Korea. The article contrasts the speed with which South Korea has been able to implement these systems with the sluggishness of the US and Europe. From the article:

"The U.S. is still stalled in the research phase and the ITIF report calls for a federal approach comparable in scale to the Interstate Highway System launched in the 1950s, with national real-time traffic information in the 100 largest cities by 2014 and a mileage-based user fee system by 2020.

It is ironic, then, that South Korea's traffic setup was adopted from the Intelligent Vehicle Highway System, an ITS forefather pushed by the U.S. Federal Highway Administration in the early 1990s.

"The majority of experts in Korea were educated in the United States," says Hwang. "We learned from the United States but we didn't see many things practiced there.""

Some of the reasons for this quick rollout may be the lack of interfering jurisdictions at state level in the US or between countries in Europe.

5.9Ghz car-to-car measurements

To get a feeling for how well car-to-car communication actually works on the 5.9Ghz ITS band we went on a test-drive last week. We equipped two vehicles and ran through a number of interesting scenarios such as:

• Travelling in different directions on the highway (~240 km/h relative speed)
• Driving in urban areas with multi-storey buildings
• Rural areas, especially at hilly locations/crests
• Flat areas with clear line-of-sight.
• Driving in the same direction on the highway with large trucks between transmitter and receiver
  

Although we had been expecting it, the correlation between line-of-sight and packet-reception-rate (PRR) was surprisingly clear. The picture below shows PRR as a function of location in the urban scenario. The yellow marker indicates where the transmitting vehicle was parked as we circled the block with the receiver. Green bars show locations with almost no packet-drops while just around the corner all packets are dropped. Ways of handling situations with such poor reception is the current focus of my research, the results from these preliminary test drives really emphasize the need for solutions to communication "black spots".



We are using the MatLab Google Earth toolbox to create these visualizations, highly recommended!

First price in the CVIS Application Innovation Contest

In an earlier post I mentioned that we were entering the CVIS Application Innovation Contest. It turned out that we made it through all the way to the finals at the ITS World Congress in Stockholm 21-25 September.

At the congress we displayed and explained our contribution, a cooperative pedestrian warning application, together with the three other finalists. It was up to the visitors to vote for the application they favored the most. And we ended up winning!

In addition to the honor of being voted as the winner by colleagues from the ITS community a cash price of €25.000 was also at stake. Read more about the competition at the CVIS website, a Swedish press-release is available here, Swedish radio have also covered it.

The four finalists during the price ceremony

See you in Stockholm

On the 21st to 25th of September the 16th World Congress on Intelligent Transportation Systems will be held in Stockholm here in Sweden. Our lab will have several presentations there, look for Halmstad University in the program.

I will present some of the work we've done on detecting hazardous traffic situations in one of the "interactive sessions" (3 slide presentation+poster session) and talk a little bit about our implementation of this detection mechanism in a V2V/V2I demonstrator.