York University is involved with industries in order to design a radar‐based All‐Weather Roadway Safety System.
Annually a significant number of first responders are killed or injured attending to roadway emergencies. While many factors contribute to this safety issue (weather, impaired driving, speeding), it is believed that most casualties can be avoided if first responders are equipped with a technology that can detect threatening vehicles and warn them before the collision. This technology is called the Radar‐based All‐Weather Roadway Safety System.
Extensive research has investigated in-vehicle collision avoidance systems (e.g., automatic braking systems) designed to protect drivers/passengers and pedestrians in the case of an emergency, but few studies have investigated systems designed to detect potential threats, such as fast-approaching vehicles, and warn first responders when they need to take pro-active evasive actions to avoid a collision. This project aims to develop a real-time threat detection and warning system using advanced Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices (e.g., wearable warning devices) coupled with a radar-based threat detection system to protect first responders working at an emergency situation. The proposed system has three essential stages: 1) detection and localization; 2) threat assessment; and 3) targeted warning. In the first stage, a radar system detects various parameters such as the speed of an approaching vehicle, the vehicle’s distance from the first responder, and the time-to-collision second-by-second. In the second stage, a threat assessment using a fuzzy inference system estimates a threat value second-by-second. In the third stage, a threshold for the threat value is determined in order to decide the appropriate threat level and the appropriate type of warning necessary to enable first responders to take pro-active action.
On this very event, participants were from York University, York Regional Police, AUG Signals, Good Roads Association, Defence Research Development of Canada.
