Midterm Presentation 24/05/04 Virtual Traffic Signal Presented by: Ron Herman Ofir Shentzer Instructor: Mr. Mony Orbach Technion – Israel Institute Of Technology Electrical Engineering Department

The Vision One of the main killers these days around the world is car accidents. The most significant factor is the driver`s lack of attention to traffic signs. A solution to this problem is to create a system which will produce a real-time signal for the driver, thus getting his attention to the road.

Project Goals Define and implement a warning system for a vehicle driver, that will play as a real time warning signal. Design and Construct a traffic signal data base, which would hold relevant information. Develop an algorithm for data updating, while acting under system constraints.

General Design

Design Description The local DB holds the information (traffic signs, special events, etc.) relevant to the vehicle’s present location. This Information is synchronized with the vehicle’s orientation. The local system interacts with a remote DB (holding the entire set of traffic signs) via cellular communication. a request for update is sent by the controller to the GSM card, and the relevant data is retrieved from the remote DB, according to the current Location. Each pre-defined time interval, the processing unit Checks whether the vehicle is in a compromising situation, and if so, a warning signal is sent to the driver through the user interface.

The Basic Idea… The system can Identify a compromising Situation to the driver, according to pre-defined profiles, that characterize which approach to the traffic sign is dangerous and may lead to an accident. A check for such situation is taken every fixed time interval, and is done by the processing unit. (example for such profile in next slide…)

An Example Profile (“Stop Sign”) Forbidden Area Safe Area As the vehicle enters the sign’s fixed area of operation (to be explained later) it’s speed and location are taken from the GPS card and this info is checked to see if the vehicle is in safe area.

The Local DB The local DB will be implemented using Microsoft’s SQL-server, for better performance and modularity. Each record in the DB represents a traffic sign of some sort, using the following identifiers: - Area of operation: direction, location, effective-radius, - work-angle. - Identity: sign-type, sign-SN. (serial number) - Borders: left-border, right-border. (these are coordinates of two points which along with the sign’s location creates triangular area that will use as the Area of operation) (example in next slide…)

The Identifiers in Practice… Visible in this drawing is the Area of operation (the shaded triangle), the sign’s direction, the work-angle, the effective radius and the left and right border points…

GPS Card Simulator In order to be independent of the GPS card, which is currently in development stages, a GPS card simulator had to be built. The simulator objective is to produce a set of coordinates and coresponding velocity values which ultimately represents a route.

Simulator cont. The simulator can produce routes which are characterized by a table of instructions. This table is one of the simulator`s inputs. Each record of the table represents a certain change in the vehicle`s path, such as a chage in acceleration or direction. (taking a turn … )

The Simulator’s Operation The Simulator is time driven, a time interval is set at initialization stage. A time counter is engaged, and when an instruction, scheduled for that time is spotted, the relevant values are updated and the route begins to take shape. The simulation output is directed to a text file, where each line, represents a card ’ s sample for our system. (example for output in next slide…)

Example Output of Simulator In this screen shot we can see the vehicle movement with the change in velocity.

Time schedule Learning SQL lang. and relevant methods (1 week) Constructing the database using SQL (1 week) Develop and implement an algorithem for recognition and analysis of compromising situations. (2 weeks) Software testing and debugging. (1 week)

End of Semester Goals A fully functional,“stand-alone” local system. This includes: 1. processing unit based on the developed algo. 2. local database. 3. GPS simulator for software testing purposes

THE END Technion – Israel Institute Of Technology Electrical Engineering Department