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.

This week, our team dedicated our efforts towards drafting our Preliminary Design Report, putting all of our research and work to date into a single document. On Wednesday, we got together to discuss our ideas and came forward with multiple plausible concepts. We’re excited to narrow down these concepts and possibly even combine them. For example, our team is looking into using two separate ideas, radar and LiDAR (light detection and ranging), to map the construction area in 2D and then detect objects intruding that area in 3D. We look forward to presenting the PDR to our sponsors, liaison engineers, and related officials at FDOT soon!

During our specification and requirement development, we were struggling to realize how the Florida Department of Transportation(FDOT) was going to use our Alert system. Today, that changed, we finally met with our liaison and we were able to clarify a lot of our requirements and specifications. We found out that our alert system will be mainly used for road maintenance operations instead of on interstate highways because FDOT puts more permanent barricades to prevent the workers from traffic accidents. With this clarity, we can move forward with confidence to ideate potential solutions.

This week our team spent time working on idea generation and this involved using various techniques such as semantic Intuition.

Through this we got a better understanding of the stakeholders involved in this project. After this the next step for our team was having a firm grasp of the requirements of our project. Then we needed to figure out how we know when we have met these requirements and this meant turning these requirements into numbers and that is what we started doing this week. Through some preliminary research we have some rough numbers but will have to take more time to get the data we need to have exact specifications. Our team is excited to work on this project and make it a success in the coming weeks.