This week Road Response has refined the ideas we included in our Preliminary Design Report. While refining these concepts, we were able to come together on many questions that were crucial to our project’s success. How far away would a vehicle need to be for our solution to alert workers in time? How could weather conditions and traffic density affect our sensors? How will data from the device be captured and stored? These were all questions that our team discussed in our many meetings this week. For an example, if we want to detect a incoming vehicle going 65 miles per hour, we would need to alert workers of the approaching vehicle within 300 meters to give workers 10 seconds to evacuate. The figure below shows the relation between distance away and time given for workers to evacuate for vehicles going at similar speeds.

As our team weighed the pros and cons of each of the concepts we generated, our team is investing our time towards building a solution using radar to detect incoming vehicles. Radar is able to preform better in weather conditions and detect vehicles from a longer distance compared to some of our other concepts. Moving forward with this concept, our team defined our preliminary architecture for the hardware and software of our solution. Our hardware includes two radar sensors that provide data to a main controller. With the input received, we hope to use existing algorithms to find the speed, direction, and jerk of vehicles to determine if they will pose a threat to workers. Our team plans to continue developing this concept for our final PDR report and presentation.