Current Projects
Intelligent Vehicles
The mission of the Intelligent Vehicle Initiative (IVI) is to accelerate the development and availability of advanced safety and information systems applied to all types of vehicles. Driver error is cited as the primary cause in about 90 percent of all police-reported crashes involving passenger vehicles, trucks, and buses; therefore, IVI's primary goal is to help drivers operate vehicles more safely and effectively with technologies integrated to create a fully intelligent vehicle that works cooperatively with the driver. IVI advocates the creation of smart vehicles that fully consider the driver's requirements, capabilities, and limitations. IVI is a multi-agency research and development effort. These projects have collectively investigated the human factors, user acceptance and technical development of individual driver information systems, advanced collision-avoidance and vehicle safety systems, and automated highway systems. By coordinating activities among DOT's agencies, IVI captures synergies in research and economizes its resources.
Trusted Truck®
The US DOT conducts close to 750,000 roadside inspections of commercial vehicles per year. Even with this seemingly large number of inspections the DOT is still being overwhelmed with the burden of performing inspections in a fashion that insures the carriers are complying with safety regulations without impacting the profitability of the carriers. The initial Trusted Truck® project helped demonstrate the ability to perform brake inspections wirelessly between the vehicle and the US DOT roadside infrastructure. This project builds on the prior work in this area to further explore the concept of wireless inspections and compliance of commercial vehicles along with ways that would help enhance the efficiency of the motor carriers. The goal will be to move closer to defining a mechanism for performing wireless vehicle inspections with sensors on critical vehicle safety systems and transmitting that data to an inspection station to support the US DOT goal of developing a capability of wireless truck inspections to enhance highway safety. more...
License Plate Recognition
License Plate Recognition (LPR) technology has been used for off-line automobile enforcement purposes. The technology has seen mixed success with correct reading rate around 60 to 70% depending on the specific application and environment. This limitation can be, and is often, remedied through human verification after the fact and before a citation is issued. Armed with advanced text-mining algorithms, this study enables LPR technology for real-time enforcement by matching plates whether correctly or incorrectly read at various locations in a network or along a corridor and, hence, tracking the movement and speed of vehicles. The focus of the project is on heavy vehicles as they are required to enter weigh stations, where the LPR tracking information can be used, in real time, for speed enforcement and/or as a triggering factor for other inspectional activities. The initial objective of the study is to devise an inexpensive and effective means for helping improve air quality in non-attainment metropolitan areas through speed enforcement. The successful deployment of such a measure can also potentially lead to improved highway safety, fuel efficiency, and national security. more...
Wireless Roadside Inspection (Joint Project with co-funding from FMCSA)
The number of commercial motor vehicles (CMVs) and the miles they travel grow each year while roadside safety inspection resources remain constant. In addition, the likelihood of a roadside safety inspection being conducted on a CMV is far less than being weighed. In 2003, there were 3 million truck inspections with a violation rate of 73 percent, and 177 million roadside trucks weigh with a violation rate of 0.29 percent. New technologies and enforcement strategies could dramatically increase the number of times a commercial vehicle and driver are examined, leading to better-targeted enforcement, creating a greater deterrence to operate unsafely, and reducing the number of truck and bus crashes. The main objective of this project is to improve highway safety through the dramatic increase of roadside safety inspections of heavy trucks and buses and their drivers enabled by wireless communications between vehicles and inspectors at highway speeds. more...
Vehicle Dynamics and Stability
Heavy Vehicle Rollover Characterization
Understanding the interactions of vehicle load, tires, suspensions, vehicle types, vehicle stiffness (tractor and trailer), and roadway surface/tire interfaces on truck rollover events can contribute significantly to improving heavy truck safety. Such understanding can be applied to support the design and evaluation of new technologies such as wider axles, new-generation single tires, adaptive suspension systems, rollover warning systems, etc. It can also contribute to improving roadway design to minimize the potential for truck rollover stemming from vehicle-highway interactions, and can contribute to more effective regulation aimed at reducing truck rollovers. more...
Co-Simulation of Heavy Truck Tire Dynamics and ELectronic Stability Control Systems
Increasingly new heavy trucks are being equipped with electronic driver aids such as electronic stability control systems ("ESC") to augment driver input and ensure vehicle stability in extreme maneuvers. While heavy truck vehicle and tire dynamic models are well understood and can be readily simulated today using computers, commercial ESC systems employ proprietary control algorithms developed by their suppliers. Therefore the effect of these systems on the overall vehicle dynamics cannot be readily simulated on the computer. Computer simulation is required to understand the effect of the system during accident avoidance maneuvers such as rapid lane changes which involve high lateral movement. more...
Vehicle Infrastructure Interaction
Enhanced Finite Element Analysis Crash Model of Tractor-Trailers
The United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) has established four major safety areas of concern for vehicle accidents most likely to cause injuries and fatalities: 1) lane change, 2) run-off-road, 3) rear-end clearance, and 4) intersections. This recommended effort focuses on technology developments to address run-off-road scenarios in which heavy trucks impact roadside barriers and other infrastructure elements. While much progress has been made over the past 15 years in analyzing the causes and effects of run-off-road accidents, much more information should be gathered, particularly for the heavy-vehicle mode of transportation. Selective computer analyses, together with limited field tests, are now being used to qualify roadside safety hardware.
The objective of this project is to evaluate, enhance and validate computer models of a heavy vehicle (tractor-semitrailer combination) that will be used in the design, and evaluation of roadside safety hardware. The NTRCI Finite Element Crash Analysis Team of Battelle, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and the University of Tennessee in Knoxville (UTK) is continuing its efforts on enhancement and validation of the National Crash Analysis Center's (NCAC) Tractor-Trailer Finite Element Model (FEM) (V01B - BetaVersion). more...