SA Government trials Cohda Wireless' in-car collision avoidance technology

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 25 May 2011 21:12

Your IT - Mobility

Imagine having technology in your car that can communicate with every other vehicle in your vicinity, figure out if you are on a collision course with any of them and warn you in time to avoid an accident. It's real, it's Australian and it's being trialled in South Australia.

The technology has been developed by Adelaide-based Cohda Wireless, a spin-off from the University of South Australia, and relies on the vehicles being equipped with GPS receivers and radio transceivers using a variant of WiFi that communicate with each other to relay speed, direction and position information.

A whole heap of smarts in the in-vehicle units - also developed by Cohda - perform the calculations and when necessary issue warnings to the driver. Roadside units can also be incorporated to warn drivers of upcoming roadworks, or an accident.

In Adelaide today South Australia's road safety minister, Tom Kenyon, launched a three month trial in which a fleet of 10 vehicles will be equipped with the technology. The trial will be run by the State's Motor Accident Commission, the Department for Transport, Energy and Infrastructure and the University of South Australia's Institute for Telecommunications Research.

"Initially a fleet of 10 DSRC vehicles will collect data in normal driving conditions during the trial with the information uploaded via roadside equipment located at the Norwood Traffic Management Centre," Kenyon said.

However the technology only comes into its own when a significant number of enabled vehicles are in the same area and Kenyon told iTWire that, if the trial is successful, the Government would like to move to a much larger scale trial in which perhaps 90 percent of the vehicles in a small town, such as Mount Gambier, were equipped with it. Such a trial however would require a budget of several million dollars.

Cohda's key technology is proprietary WiFi receivers that are able to provide reliable non-line of site communications between moving vehicles in built up areas over distances of several hundred metres.

A variant of WiFi, 802.11p operating in the 5.9GHz band, has been adopted as the standard for dedicated short range communications (DSRC) for future intelligent transport systems (ITS). But according to Cohda 802.11p is not able to provide sufficiently reliable communication, non-line-of-site, over sufficient distance between vehicles in congested urban environments to enable collisions to be avoided.

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