SBIR-STTR Award

Broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is summarized as follows. (1) Social impact: Transportation is the bloodstream of this nation with its level of importance being second to water. This country?s roadways are public use and the PI?s proposed technology is aimed at maintaining a fair and unbiased information infrastructure that satisfies the needs of both automotive and government agencies to fulfill their roles in public use and safety. (2) Commercial impact: The ability for vehicles to identify roadside regulations and guidance will provide several beneficial factors that will help alleviate driver distraction while aiding in additional cognitive awareness and safety. Additionally, wireless capable road signs can provide additional resources than their static counterparts that will make them more attractive and cost effective to their responsible entity/agency. (3) Technical impact: The project pushes the abilities of ultra low powered devices to extend the idea of location services, thus location dependent information is stored at its source producing almost instantaneous availability.The proposed project is working on further advancing and refining a small electronic device with wireless capabilities known as a roadside unit to meet the regulations of the United States Sign Council (USSC) motorist reaction distance for visual street cues to facilitate safe vehicle responses. Satisfying this requirement involves a novel communication protocol structured around efficient message transmission at ultra-low operating power to quickly detect and respond to moving vehicles with minimal energy usage. The projects communication protocol is designed to use minimal power while maximizing the amount of data throughput to ensure an operational lifespan of a battery powered device for a minimum of 10 years while achieving significant transmission distance. Because roadside infrastructure is standardized there is an opportunity for advanced data management techniques to simplify data transmission and decoding. The proposed system integrates and enhances the current vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication platform by offering another layer of sophisticated physical object identification. As vehicles take on autonomous responsibilities, they?ll need reliable, accurate, and authenticatable information about their surroundings with enough notice to facilitate safe responses.

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is to lay a foundation for vehicle to infrastructure communication focused on applications that add direct value to mobility. Many solutions are focused on getting information to the vehicle, while it is often the infrastructure that requires vehicle information to operate more efficiently. Currently, traffic signals enforce the right-of-way of everyone regardless of in-vehicle technology. This is why optimizing their effects on the road network can provide tremendous benefit. There are significant benefits to transit as well, like buses and light rail that, when given priority at intersections, improves on-time performance which is a major factor in ridership rates.The proposed project advances the work of the joint standardization of the National Transportation Communications for Intelligent Transportation Systems Protocol (NTCIP) to achieve interoperability between various traffic signal controller vendors to enable shared control and organization between different operating agencies. It is not unusual to have sections of roadway be managed by local, county, and state within the same small area. These overlapping jurisdictions produce fractures within the road network resulting in the asynchronous timing of traffic signals. The aim is to consolidate the management into a signal network capable of coordinating large areas of traffic signals to increase mobility's overall efficiency. With a cloud solution that is capable of speaking to each networked intersection, vehicle telemetry data and route information can be used to proactively optimize signal timing. Working with prioritized vehicles such as buses, fire trucks, and ambulances, pilot studies will be conducted to perform priority and preemption along routes that cross jurisdictions. Each pilot case will be analysed based on key performance indicators set forth by the agencies.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.