1. Promoting Road Safety through Deployment of Driver Assistance and Warning System

The broader objective of the project is to promote road safety through development/ implementation of sensors for vehicles and evaluation of driving behaviour, leading to driver assistance and warning systems to prevent accidents.

The specific objectives are:

• To develop data collection equipment and applications using sensors such as millimeter wave radar, gyroscope, accelerometer and GPS for deploying in automotive vehicles to collect driving behaviour data
• To instrument test vehicles with data collection equipment relevant to evaluation of driving behaviour in field traffic conditions (city road stretches) and collect data for analysis and evaluation
• To evaluate driving behaviour under various traffic conditions by analysing the collected data during test runs
• To build driving behaviour models to assess driver propensity, thereby evaluating driving safety
• To develop and instrument On-board Driver Assistance and Warning Systems (ODAWS)
• To evaluate ODAWS’s safety enhancement features under various scenarios of traffic conditions
• Explore the possibility of commercialization of ODAWS
• Knowledge creation and capacity building by providing platform to faculty, students (bachelors, masters and doctoral levels) and technical staff through development and instrumentation of vehicles with driving data capturing sensors, real-time data, driver behaviour modelling and data analytics

The lead institute for this project is IIT Madras. C-DAC will help IIT M in instrumenting the vehicles by supplying the hardware and developing appropriate application for data collection. C-DAC will absorb the technology through continuous interaction with the project team at IIT M.

Expected outcome

• Data collection equipment and applications using sensors for deploying in automotive vehicles to collect driving behaviour data
• Instrumented vehicle for assessing driving behaviour
• Driving behaviour models
• On-board driver assistance and warning system
• Capacity building ((Doctoral, masters and bachelors students and project staff)

Industry Connect

The On-board Driver Assistance and Warning System (ODAWS) has immense potential in promoting road safety by preventing accidents or by mitigating the severity of these. If potential for commercialization is seen, several car manufacturers will likely come forward to adopt this system in their vehicles. Mahindra and Mahindra (M&M) has already indicated interest in collaborating in this research effort and issued support letter to this effect. Mahindra Research Valley (MRV) located near Chennai is offering two of their vehicles for instrumentation by us and subsequent data collection on driving behaviour. The successful integration of such a system in new cars will lead to deep market penetration, leading ultimately to safety benefit of four-wheeler users.