Volpe Center

Engineer, Crash Avoidance and Vehicle Safety

Volpe National Transportation Systems Center, Research and Innovative Technology Administration, US DOT

Worked with a small team that evaluated the effectiveness of in-vehicle-based safety systems for studies sponsored by the US Department of Transportation. These safety systems included: lane change, merge, and lane departure warnings (lateral movement into a clear or occupied lane, using side radar), forward collision warnings (approaching car ahead too fast, using front radar), and curve speed warnings (going into a curve too fast, using GPS to check against known road geometry).

Using gigabytes of video and vehicle movement data collected from a fleet of cars and trucks outfitted with sensors and cameras, we developed algorithms to identify near-collisions (and saw some actual ones) and helped classify them based on observed distractions. Had personal responsibility for developing Excel sheets to automate data analysis as well as a widely used desktop application in C# .NET to match up 2/5/10 Hz vehicle data with five different angles of recorded video (having different frame rates).