A new vehicle control system is coming- U of W

 

By Kayla Wang

With the high rate of roadway collisions, what can people do to avoid car accidents and make it more safer for drivers? A group of researchers from University of Windsor are aiming to invent an well-rounded program which would be used in car and will reduce the car accidents because of collisions.
Arunita Jaekel, Dr. Robert Kent and Ziad Kobti, the director of the University of Windsor School of Computer Science are working on this project together, Jaekel says some students will be working with them.

“They are all computer science students, so far we’ve had two students who have graduated and have master degrees in computer science, working specific in this vehicle communication project. The following up students will be graduated will be work on this project.” She said.
Jaekel said they started this program not only because their technic interest, but also because of it’s social relevance.
“For the u.s. there is about 5 million crashes per year, with over 100,000 fatalities in those crashes. For Canada, over 125.000 crashes per year and tens of thousands fatalities due to automatically car accidents. 80 percent of those are non-impaired drive.” Jaekel said.
She said collision warning systems could reduce non-impaired collisions by 70 to 80 per cent.

Since people already have what is available such as GPS, Dr. Robert Kent, a computer science professor, said this program is different from other car control systems.
“What were
challenge with is the inability for vehicles to communicate with other vehicles in large numbers.” Said Kent. “We can have a vehicle which communicate with satellite station in order to pick up the GPS signal. That is fairly easy problem that is already solved. The problem has yet not been solved is how we get one vehicle to communicate with potentially 10 or 50,000 other vehicles, all of whom are travelling between 50-120 kilometers an hour.”
Dr. Kent says this is a long term project which might take 10 or 15 years to to be totally finished and it is very costly but will have a reasonable price when people by it.

“So this type of unit here by the time that the company has cut down the volume manufacturer, like one of these units now can be several ten of dollars, but the actual cost maybe 50 dollars, it will not be very high costly item, because eventually this will be built into every single car on the road.” Kent said.

He also said the funding of this program is from industry partners, federal government and the natural Scientist Engenary foundation.

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