An improved method to calculate the time-to-collision of two vehicles

In order to improve vehicle safety, a interaction phase between primary and secondary safety systems has been defined. These systems use information provided by the primary safety systems to achieve both the primary and the secondary systems' objectives. It is essential to discriminate whether a collision is avoidable or not and to calculate the time available before the crash happens. This paper shows a method that improves on other simplified methods to calculate the time-to-collision (TTC) to provide a more accurate result that could be used in a collision avoidance system.The work reported in this paper has been partly funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (SAMPLER project TRA2010 20225 C03 01 and TRA2010 20225 C03 03; and IVANET project TRA 2010 15645)

SaferCross: Enhancing Pedestrian Safety Using Embedded Sensors of Smartphone

The number of pedestrian accidents continues to keep climbing. Distraction from smartphone is one of the biggest causes for pedestrian fatalities. In this paper, we develop SaferCross, a mobile system based on the embedded sensors of smartphone to improve pedestrian safety by preventing distraction from smartphone. SaferCross adopts a holistic approach by identifying and developing essential system components that are missing in existing systems and integrating the system components into a "fully-functioning" mobile system for pedestrian safety. Specifically, we create algorithms for improving the accuracy and energy efficiency of pedestrian positioning, effectiveness of phone activity detection, and real-time risk assessment. We demonstrate that SaferCross, through systematic integration of the developed algorithms, performs situation awareness effectively and provides a timely warning to the pedestrian based on the information obtained from smartphone sensors and Direct Wi-Fi-based peer-to-peer communication with approaching cars. Extensive experiments are conducted in a department parking lot for both component-level and integrated testing. The results demonstrate that the energy efficiency and positioning accuracy of SaferCross are improved by 52% and 72% on average compared with existing solutions with missing support for positioning accuracy and energy efficiency, and the phone-viewing event detection accuracy is over 90%. The integrated test results show that SaferCross alerts the pedestrian timely with an average error of 1.6sec in comparison with the ground truth data, which can be easily compensated by configuring the system to fire an alert message a couple of seconds early.Comment: Published in IEEE Access, 202

Generating a 3D Simulation of a Car Accident from a Written Description in Natural Language: the CarSim System

This paper describes a prototype system to visualize and animate 3D scenes from car accident reports, written in French. The problem of generating such a 3D simulation can be divided into two subtasks: the linguistic analysis and the virtual scene generation. As a means of communication between these two modules, we first designed a template formalism to represent a written accident report. The CarSim system first processes written reports, gathers relevant information, and converts it into a formal description. Then, it creates the corresponding 3D scene and animates the vehicles.Comment: 8 pages, ACL 2001, Workshop on Temporal and Spatial Information Processin