Technologies Involved

The overarching goal of the IVBSS program is to combine existing safety and collision avoidance systems into an integrated system that can warn drivers of imminent crashes. The program will work with the automotive, trucking and transit industries to introduce such technologies into the U.S. vehicle fleet (including light, commercial, and transit vehicles), effectively reducing the number and severity of rear-end, road departure, and lane change crashes.

A number of existing technologies are being utilized to address the three crash avoidance scenarios; these technologies will be further developed to work together to establish the integrated system:

• Rear-end Collision Avoidance: GPS, digital mapping, forward looking radar, and on-board cameras are used to warn drivers that they may be approaching the vehicle ahead of them at too great a speed to stop before crashing.
• Road Departure Collision Avoidance: vision based line tracking, and map-based road geometry, are used to warn drivers if they are about to drift off the road and crash into an obstacle, of if they are traveling too fast to for an upcoming curve.
• Lane Change/Merge Collision Avoidance: forward, rear and side-looking radar and vision-based cameras are used to determine if it is safe for the driver to change lanes or merge into a lane from an entrance ramp.

All systems use software that monitors vehicle speed, braking and throttle output, and provide messages to the driver if necessary.

The technologies noted above, along with control technologies yet to be developed, will be focused on enhancing driver performance by integrating the three collision avoidance systems into one. These emerging technologies will be developed as part of the Preparatory Analyses and the ensuing Program activities.

Limitations and Issues

Significant limitations have been addressed with the development of previous collision avoidance systems, and will have to be readdressed in an integrated manner, include the following:

• False alarms – designing a system that will be provide accurate information to the driver, with as few false warnings as possible to inspire confidence in the system;
• Driver workload – avoiding warnings that overwhelm the driver with too many warnings, leading drivers to tune out all alarms; and
• Driver inattention – ensuring that the system is forceful enough to impact inattentive drivers, without becoming an annoyance.

Application to Other Initiatives

The IVBSS Program grew out of the Intelligent Vehicle Initiative (IVI), which provided many of the background studies needed to create the integrated collision warning system being proposed. Research on the three types of collision avoidance systems was part of the IVI Program mandate, in addition to human factors research and driver-vehicle interface studies.

Both the Cooperative Intersection Collision Avoidance Systems Initiative (CICAS) and the Vehicle Infrastructure Integration (VII) Programs will be working closely with the IVBSS team to coordinate activities where they can be mutually beneficial.