MIT's intelligent onboard transportation systems to prevent car collisions

The latest in road transport technology is the huge amount of work been done on developing intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Researchers at MIT are working on a technology that will lead to ‘in-vehicle cooperative safety’. The ITS systems are designed to warn drivers of other speeding vehicles on the same path.

MIT smart car

Scientists have developed advanced safety systems such as blind spot warning systems, traction control and automated cruise control to prevent car crashes. The research at MIT aims to improve upon these existing systems and envision a future when all vehicles running on

the road will be safe.

The main problem that the engineers at MIT are working on is that even if most cars on the road are equipped with these modern systems they will always have to be contend with human operated old cars. The idea is to work out an effective algorithm that will account for human behaviors so that drivers are warned of potential collisions.

Researchers at MIT believe that human driving behavior can be categorized while braking and accelerating as where and when a certain car can be at a given point of time. Thus, there are a definite set of points where a car can be based on the driving pattern. The program developed at MIT takes these factors into consideration, besides many others and is essentially an algorithm that calculates the

possible collision points for any two vehicles plying on road. The ITS enabled car can use the information to prevent action and thus avoid an accident.

The key to making this system a success is to develop an excellent communication hardware that reduces inevitable virtual delays. The team at MIT experimented with two fully programmed toy cars, one duly fitted with the new ITS and another human operated vehicle. These cars were made to run on overlapping circular tracks and the system was put to test. Of the 100 trials car collisions were prevented 97 times.

Via: MIT/PopSci