Feeling sleepy? Well the best advice Biglorryblog can give you is to pull over and get your head down for 10-15 minutes. Especially if you're driving a truck! A couple of years ago Volvo laid on a safety seminar at a test track in sweden for Europe's finest (or worst) transport hacks. And amongst the technology they showed us was a device to monitor the driver's eyes to see if he was dropping off.
Well it seems that the parent company AB Volvo has taken the matter further as Volvo Technology Transfer (the Swedish car truck and bus manufacturer's specialist division set up to develop and support new businesses and technologies attractive to the Volvo Group) is now investing in 'Seeing Machines', a clever bit of kit developed by an Australian company that detects and warns vehicle drivers in the event of tiredness.
Seeing Machines' forte is computerised technology which is able to track and follow head and eye movements and facial expressions which incorporates a small camera in the cab that automatically detects signs of driver tiredness and distraction. A special program processes the images taken by the camera and measures the position of the head and rotation, eye movements and eyelid behaviour against acceptable 'awake' parameters. Apparently distraction and work load can be measured using head and eye movements---that's it working above.
The system detects when a driver is tired by registering abnormal head and eye movement---for example how often the eyes open and close. Should a driver close his or her eyes beyond normal blinking, it's immediately registered, and an alarm is triggered with an audible warning and flashing lights on the dashboard that direct the driver's gaze back towards the road.
Of course the real question BLB has is: 'Should we be relying on a sophisticated technical solution to keep a driver awake at the wheel? Or should drivers simply take the matter into their own hands and stop when they feel tired?' (Assuming of course they can find a parking space anywhere on the UK motorweay network without being clamped!)
What does my anorak army think?
Meanwhile, click through for more safety news and an unusual blow-up 'bouncy' car....
"We hope that this technology will reduce the number of accidents on our roads and become an important feature in safety efforts at vehicle manufacturers,” says Stig Fagerståhl at Volvo Technology Transfer and responsible for investing in Seeing Machines.
The Swedish truck maker goes on to tell Biglorryblog: "Experiences from the Volvo Group’s accident investigations and general traffic safety research show that accidents are a combination of the human factor, vehicle problems and/or the traffic environment, in which the human factor accounts for 90% of accidents. This was confirmed by new research conducted at the Virginia Tech Transport Institute that demonstrates even more distinctly that inattentiveness, due to tiredness or distraction, is the single largest and most significant cause of accidents."
In the meantime, I promised you a blow-up bouncy car... and here it is. At the same seminar as it showed us the drowsy driver detection system, the Swedes also demonstrated an automatic emergency braking system based upon the proposed next generation smart cruise control. Most HGV Adaptive Cruise Control (or ACC) systems can only slow a vehicle down based upon the differences in relative speed between two moving vehicles. Indeed from the outset ACC systems have had to 'ignore' stationary objects in front of them so it's been possible to drive a truck into the back of a stationary queue of traffic with ACC working as it simply doesn't 'see' the stationary object in front.
However, on the aforementioned test day, Volvo showed us an artic with modified forward looking ACC radar which could detect a stationary object (in this case a car) and automatically apply the brakes if the approaching truck driver didn't start to do anything about it within a give distance.
As part of the test we hacks were encouraged to drive at the bouncy rubber car (naturally we couldn't use a real one!) at various speeds without taking our foot of the gas...very strange! At 30mph the system worked well enough, and stopped us just before we touched the back of the car. At 50mph the braking was more severe and although we still hit the car the speed at which we did so was signficantly lower than 50mph! (Closer to 10-15mph) Thus the system would mean the survivability of a car passenger would be greatly increased when tail-ended by an HGV driven by someone who wasn't paying attention to the road ahead.
Whether the sytem is now commercially available now I don't know. Perhaps my 'friends' in Volvo can help me and post a comment as to what progress has since been made with the prototype?
Leave a comment
What a user pic? Get a Gravatar!