Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation

Project Description

The number of traffic fatalities continues to climb at a high rate. Among them, more than half are vulnerable road users (VRUs). Ensuring VRU safety is an urgent issue as it is essential to allow pedestrians, bicyclists, wheelchair users, and others the safe use of roadways in urban and rural environments around the world. Tremendous efforts have also been devoted to the development of collision avoidance systems (CAS) and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). In these solutions, VRUs play a “passive” role in protecting themselves, as they rely on vehicles to detect their presence. Alternatively, our approaches enhance VRU safety in a more “proactive” manner. We have been pursuing to build affordable and intelligent assistive tools to protect VRU safety as they travel in the transportation network.

Smartphone-based Assistive Tool for Cyclist Safety: One of the most startling and infuriating conflicts that cyclists experience is the so-called “right hook”. It refers to a vehicle striking a cyclist heading in the same direction by turning right into the cyclist. To prevent such a crash, we develop CycleGuard, an acoustic-based collision detection system using smartphones. It is composed of a cheap commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) portable speaker that emits imperceptible high-frequency acoustic signals and a smartphone for reflected signal reception and analysis. Since received acoustic signals bear rich information of their reflecting objects, CycleGuard applies advanced acoustic ranging techniques to extract those information for traffic analysis. Cyclists are alerted if any pending right hook crashes are detected. Real-time alerts ensure that cyclists have sufficient time to react, apply brakes, and eventually avoid the hazard. In the above video, we show how CycleGuard works in real-world scenarios.

Assisting People with Visual Impairments to Cross Uncontrolled Streets: To cross uncontrolled roadways, where no traffic-halting signal devices are present, pedestrians with visual impairments must rely on their other senses to detect oncoming vehicles and estimate the correct crossing interval in order to avoid potentially fatal collisions. To overcome the limitations of human auditory performance, which can be particularly impacted by weather or background noise, we develop an assisting tool called Acoussist, which relies on acoustic ranging to provide an additional layer of protection for pedestrian safety. The vision impaired can use the tool to double-confirm surrounding traffic conditions before they proceed through a non-signaled crosswalk. The Acoussist tool is composed of vehicle-mounted external speakers that emit acoustic chirps at a frequency range imperceptible by human ears, but detectable by smartphones operating the Acoussist app. This app would then communicate to the user when it is safe to cross the roadway.

Principal Investigator Team

Ming Li Associate Professor Department of computer science and Engineering The University of Texas At Arlington Homepage: http://ranger.uta.edu/~mingli

Kari Edison Watkins Associate Professor Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering University of California at Davis Homepage: https://cee.engineering.ucdavis.edu/people/kari-watkins

Shuchi Deb Assistant Professor Industrial, Manufacturing and Systems Engineering The University of Texas At Arlington Homepage: https://www.uta.edu/academics/faculty/profile?username=debs

Publications

CycleGuard: A Smartphone-based Assistive Tool for Cyclist Safety Using Acoustic Ranging,
Wenqiang Jin, Srinivasan Murali, Youngtak Cho, Huadi Zhu, Tianhao Li, Rachael Thompson Panik, Anika Rimu, Shuchisnigdha Deb, Kari Watkins, Xu Yuan, Ming Li
ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp’22)

Acoussist: An Acoustic Assisting Tool For People With Visual Impairments To Cross Uncontrolled Streets,
Wenqiang Jin, Mingyan Xiao, Huadi Zhu, Shuchisnigdha Deb, Chen Kan, and Ming Li
ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp’21)