AL AIN // A team from the UAE University is working on a new intelligent transport system to enable cars to communicate with each other.
Six years after the team first started work on the project, it is now ready for its first deployment test, said Yaser Hawas, director of the Roadway, Transportation and Traffic Safety Research Centre at the university.
“The wow factor is we are now collaborating with Tata Consulting Group and we are going to have a deployment test in Al Ain,” he said.
“We are going to equip six vehicles to do the field testing — each vehicle is going to send information to the other vehicles — and we are then going to see how this information is going to be propagated.”
The inter-vehicular communication system is based on an algorithm that enables vehicles to use route guidance in urban traffic networks.
The algorithm enables communication between a ‘searcher’ vehicle and ‘candidate’ vehicles whose origin matches the destination of the searcher vehicle, and travelling in the opposite direction.
This information can then be used to calculate in the simplest way the shortest path for each vehicle from its current position to the destination.
“Currently, the fully autonomous vehicles available move in the network assuming that they know where to go,” Professor Hawas said.
“But the one that we are testing enables the vehicles to change their routes and get better ones to reach the destination using the information that they receive from other vehicles. Again, it is not only simulation tests that we do here in the centre, but we are also going to take it to a deployment stage here in Al Ain.”
The team is developing the hardware and software solutions of all the devices that will enable vehicle-to-vehicle communication between the six cars, including GPS and communication capabilities.
This will enable the vehicles to locate each other and redirect vehicles automatically in real-time to reach their aimed destinations in the network. Following the deployment test, the university will prepare technical papers detailing the results of the test, Prof Hawas said.
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