Connected vehicles

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141104-0803 EST

A DOT (Department of Transportation) project at the U of M was started a couple years ago in the North Campus area with about 3000 vehicles. The subject vehicles were personally owned by residents or workers in the North Campus area. The sensing, indicating, and communication equipment was installed in selected vehicles. My son-in-law did not participate because he did not want his car modified. There was also equipment installed in the roads and intersections in the area.

Goals of the project were to determine how well inter-communication vehicle-to-vehicle and to roads would improve driver experience and reduce accidents.

Just a couple sites from Google. There are many more. These are just broad scope, not much detail.

https://www.michigan.gov/documents/mdot/mdot_connected_vehicle_update_v4_n1_369079_7.pdf 2011
http://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/MIDOT/bulletins/ce023f 2014

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[K8MHZ]

At least they are testing it on the 696. If it works there, it should work anywhere. Anyone that has driven the 696, especially at rush hour, should know what I mean.

 

[gar]

141104-1335 EST

I believe that some of the data being transferred from near by cars is acceleration (0 means constant speed, -1 G is a panic stop), speed, distance between vehicles, road conditions (coefficient of friction), white-out or fog, brake pressure, and relative direction. Knowing the acceleration of several vehicles in front and their relative distance can greatly reduce the number of rear end collisions.

On a recent local PBS program it was mentioned that with the 3000 cars in the Michigan test that there are a sufficient number of times that 5 cars are communicating with each other that useful data can be obtained.

Apparently the test results have indicated that results are sufficiently good to continue and expand the experiment.

On North Campus :
http://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/index.ssf/2014/03/university_of_michigan_approve_3.html Doesn't say much and no pictures.

In the 1950s I worked in the first building on north campus. We moved into the newly completed Cooley Building in the fall of 1953. At that time there were about 2000 acres of open land and lots of ragweed. Now it is getting fairly full of buildings and land use.

All of engineering is now on the North Campus.

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