Accident
Warning System at Intersection
Statement of the Problem
Background
Vehicle collisions at intersections account for a large
percentage of overall traffic accidents. Figure 1 shows three of the most
common ways for collisions at intersections.
Figure 1: Common reasons for collisions at intersections The situations illustrated in Figure 1 account for 65%
of injury accidents and 70% of fatal accidents. It is also true that for the
past thirty years, the annual fatality rate due to traffic accidents in the
United States has been over 40,000. We can prevent a large number of these accidents from
occurring if we could provide drivers with warnings about potential
collisions. For example, if a system could warn a car sitting at an
intersection that another car is about to run the light, the driver waiting
at the intersection would then not immediately start driving the minute the
light turns green for him since he would be aware that there could be a
potential collision with a car running the light. Our project concentrates on using technology to
provide warnings to drivers about potential accidents and collisions at
intersections.
The Design
Vehicle Infrastructure Integration The Accident Warning System we plan on creating falls under
a broader system called the Vehicle Infrastructure Integration (VII). This
system enables real-time wireless communication between cars and between cars
and static intelligent stations or units to help create an efficient and safe
transportation system. VII is a massive system whose various applications and
technologies are under research and testing in various parts of the world
– especially in the United States and Europe. Figure 2 illustrates the
many varied applications of VII.
Figure 2: Applications of VII Dedicated Short Range
Communication Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) is a
wireless communication protocol in the 5.9 GHz frequency band with a
bandwidth of 75 MHz. It refers to short to medium range wireless
communications that offers data transfer in a vehicular ad-hoc network. The
IEEE Standard for it is 802.11p. This standard is exclusively for
transportation communication systems.
Project Deliverables
Our project exclusively focuses on the Safety aspect of
VII using DSRC. The goal of our project is illustrated by Figure 3.
Figure 3: Accident Warning System at
Intersections
From Figure 3, we notice two main components of the
accident warning system: 1. Roadside Unit (RSU) This is a component of the
system which acts as the central unit. It is in constant contact with the
traffic light in order to determine when the light will turn red. Once it
realizes that the light will turn red, it starts treating all messages from
the OnBoard Unit as Event Messages. Hence, it uses
the speed and location information being transmitted to determine whether the
car transmitting the message will run the red light, and if it will, then it
needs to warn the other cars of this possibility. 2. OnBoard Unit (OBU) This is a component of the
system located within a car. It constantly calculates the speed and location
of the car, and transmits this information to the Roadside Unit. It also
receives the warning signal from the Roadside Unit telling it to activate the
alarm system in order to warn the driver of whether a car will run the light. We have further narrowed our goal by placing the
following restrictions on our project: 1.
Accident Warning System of only whether a car will run the red light This means that there will be no
path and speed suggestion provided to the driver. There will also be no
warning for pedestrians crossing the road. The project only deals with
warning a driver if another car is about to run the red light. 2.
Limitation to only one speeding car Unlike a real-life scenario,
there will only be one car approaching the intersection, and one other car
receiving a warning of whether the approaching car will run the red light. 3.
Real-Life demonstration We hope to accomplish a real-life demonstration of the
working project. 4.
Technical Documentation A comprehensive documentation
will be completed and delivered to the advisors of this project.
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This page is maintained by Richa
Prasad.
© 2007
University of Massachusetts Amherst •
Amherst, MA 01003