Beijing: Day 0.9, or Beep, Beep

So I arrived in China in fine shape--well, as fine as you can be after a 14-hour plane trip in economy class--to participate in CSDN-Dr. Dobb's Software Development 2.0 conference in Beijing.

Luckily, the fine folks at CSDN had a ride waiting for me. But what the ride didn't have -- but could have used -- was a project that engineers at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed -- IVBSS, a laser-based ranging system to assess the performance of automobile collision warning systems.

Not that we needed it, I think the driver was telling me. ("I think" because I don't speak Chinese -- yet.) But he was quite calm and it seemed perfectly normal to him that two cars traveling in opposite directions at relatively high speeds should be vying for the same road space. After all, it was rush hour. Not that traffic is anymore chaotic in Beijing than in San Francisco, but it did seem that someone was going the wrong way on a one-way street at just about every turn.

Still, he might have been correct, at least by U.S. standards. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, there are 3.6 million rear-end, road departure and lane change crashes that occur each year in the U.S., which is why NIST engineers are working on advaned Integrated Vehicle-Based Safety Systems (IVBSS) with the goal of reducing such collisions by 48 percent.

The NIST system consists of a camera and microphone in the vehicle's cab that detect the driver's warning, a suite of calibrated cameras to measure the distance to lane boundaries, and laser scanners to measure the distance to obstacles forward and to the side of the vehicle. The NIST system can detect an object to within about 4/5 of a meter from up to 60 meters away at speeds up to 25 m/s (within 33 inches at a distance of 197 feet and speeds up to 56 mph.)

The Department of Transportation is going to equip 20 automobiles and 10 trucks with the the IVBSS warning system. If they need test vehicles, there's no lack of them here in Beijing.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 08:36 PM  Permalink