How can connected vehicles make roads safer?

We hear a lot about ‘connected cars’ and the growing importance of vehicles with smart sensors and access to the cloud, but sometimes the topic is confused by the buzzwords. use.

Connected cars are connected to the internet, meaning they access over-the-air updates and downloadable apps, among other things. Two-way transmission means cars can also send their data to central management systems and the cloud.

This gives people a way to keep their cars up to date or generate a revenue stream for auto brands. But its potential goes far beyond this: it could also make roads safer and less congested.

Australian road intelligence company Compass IoT (Internet of Things), co-founded by Emily Bobis and Angus McDonald, last year won awards from Google Cloud and the Australian Small Business Champion Award.

Compass aggregates anonymized vehicle performance data from 64 car brands – so most of them – coming from embedded sensors via built-in SIM or via a classically fitted telematics system on old cars. From there, machine learning uncovers trends and resulting patterns in the traffic flow.

That means recording and sharing things like braking, turning, pitch, roll and deflection proportionally, allowing the right pairs of eyes to identify traffic jams or potential black spots. – before they become black spots.

The company says its dataset has doubled every year for the past four years and now maps 2.2 million trips per day for a total of about one billion data points. They are outlined as dots on graphs and maps, from which trained eyes can infer all kinds of situations from car behaviors.

This is considered a more proactive and approachable approach than traffic surveys using pipe counts, cameras, or manual count requests. As a result, it has attracted the attention of local councils, road operators, state governments, researchers and insurance companies.

“There isn’t enough data on how people actually move around reliable and scalable cities. So in September 2018, we launched Compass IoT and worked with it between our casual jobs and classes,” said the company’s founders.

We spoke with co-founder Emily Bobis, who said older forms of road intelligence gathering required higher costs and couldn’t be as detailed as the Compass IoT dashboard.

“Near miss is a case of sudden braking or swerving measured at high G-forces, allowing you to proactively identify areas of high crash risk. A cluster that almost missed [is suggestive],” Ms. Bobis told us when asked to provide examples of how to best use the data.

Some case studies using Compass IoT include:

• A North Sydney council wanted to see how many motorists were doing ‘rat runs’ through the backstreets instead of using major axes as designed and traffic flow mapped.
• A client wanted to see if the width of the Heathcote Bridge over the Woronora River would cause drivers to brake hard due to the narrow lanes. It was.
• An analysis of vehicle g-forces, speed and braking at a train track crossing the NSW Castlereagh motorway near Ben Bullen showed that vehicles were not following the curve’s recommended speed.
• One company wanted to see if road signs with different messages had different effects on driver behavior. Connected media data shows that one sign has more affection than the other.
• The data showed a number of rear-end collisions on the M7 ramp at Glendenning, leading engineers to theorize that backflow could be the culprit. By analyzing car movements, navigation and braking, Transurban customers have found evidence that this is indeed the case.
• Construction is underway on Fulham Road in Townsville and a traffic control company wants to know how safe a certain section of road is for construction workers and use the data to improve safety regulations. for all workers.

Of course, there are questions. For instance, what about data privacy?

“There are always questions about Big Brother,” admitted Miss Bobis. “We don’t track people, [but rather] synthesize car movements, she added.

There are privacy constraints applied to the data, including cutting the origin and final destination of the media. VIN data is never collected, stored or used without explicit consent from the vehicle owner, the company added.

As for frequency, it claims data paths with less than 100 millisecond latency, so clients using the realtime API can receive data every 5 seconds or so. Compass says it now connects vehicle data on almost every road in Australia.

What is next? An important potential application of connected car data, Ms. Bobis stated, includes tracing the use of electric vehicles, which public toll service providers can use to find out where to go. best to book station and get quick return on investment.

Of course, it’s not just companies like Compass exploring the potential safety benefits of connected cars.

For example, the Mercedes-Benz E- and S-Class use vehicle-to-vehicle communication to warn the following vehicles of unexpected risks such as impending black tape or an accident.

Meanwhile, Audi’s vehicle-to-infrastructure system works by telling the driver their ideal speed for catching a green light and also the time until the next green light. If a red light stop is unavoidable, the countdown timer will show the number of seconds remaining until the next green light period.

Skoda is also working on a robotic ‘lollipop lady’ called IPA2X is designed to communicate with vehicles through animations on the infotainment system.

It will display a notification when a pedestrian is approaching or already on it.