SHRP 2 Safety Research at UMTRI

Posted 11/05/2007
UMTRI has been awarded three projects under the Strategic Highway Research Program 2 (SHRP 2) to collect and use naturalistic driving data to improve highway safety. UMTRI is leading two of the projects, which are headed by Tim Gordon, and playing a major role in the third.

The initial phase of this four-year, $43.2 million safety research program will include a pilot study for vehicle-based data collection, a second pilot for the automated capture of vehicle trajectories using roadside video capture, and leading-edge research using geographic information systems (GIS) to analyze safety data captured during earlier naturalistic vehicle studies.

While crash analysis is an established field, little is known about the precursors to highway crashes, particularly in terms of how driver behavior contributes to crash risk. Dr. Gordon says, "This research program aims to develop a new and detailed understanding of the factors and mechanisms that lead to highway crashes, particularly the very large numbers that happen at intersections or involve cars running off the road."

The information gathered in this research will support the development of new safety measures based on improved highway design, vehicle technologies, and even next-generation communications systems that will network vehicles and the highway to improve safety. UMTRI director Peter Sweatman says, "SHRP 2 is the major scientific effort of our generation to understand driving behavior and risk."

For the vehicle-based data project, which will be led by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, researchers will record and analyze high-quality, naturalistic driving data from test vehicles that subjects will drive as they would their own vehicles. This will involve fitting electronic data systems to the vehicles of volunteer drivers, and recording huge amounts of information on driving patterns and driver response to different situations on the road. The initial pilot study is to develop the necessary reliable and highly capable data collection systems – ones that can be fitted and left in place for up to a year at a time, recording events in great detail. Not only will crashes be recorded, but the risk factors will be better understood, and this knowledge will be applied to improve safety. With several thousand vehicles to be instrumented in the main study, the pilot project will provide a robust proof of concept, developing sensing, data recording. database and analysis systems to support what will be an unprecedented resource for vehicle safety research in the future.

The roadside, or site-based, data systems project, will be developed with a similar aim, but using data captured from the outside world. The system to be developed will provide high-accuracy video motion capture, based on modern digital video technology and image processing from multiple cameras set up at intersections. This work will improve upon earlier studies UMTRI and others have carried out, most especially in terms of high levels of automation and improved accuracy. One particular aim will be to develop "crash surrogates" from the data captured, which means that data can be used to assess crash risk, without having to wait long periods to count numbers of actual crashes. This will provided a stepping stone for the rapid evaluation of safety systems and design improvements in the future.

The third project that UMTRI will be working on is to develop new techniques for safety analysis based on the integration of highway and other geographic data with naturalistic driving data. For example, when drivers are regularly challenged by particular situations, and those situations tend to arise at particular locations, the combined datasets will provide the basis for understanding the underlying reasons and suggesting countermeasures. This research is particularly targeted at run-off-road crashes and builds on technology and data previously developed by UMTRI.

Researchers from UMTRI's Engineering Research, Human Factors, Transportation Safety Analysis, and Social and Behavioral Analysis Divisions will work together to contribute to this research effort. The vehicle-based safety study is being led by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, and supporting research on the two UMTRI projects will be provided by Battelle; the University of California, Berkeley; Soar Technology, Inc.; the Michigan Department of Transportation; and Dinh-Zarr Associates.

The SHPR2 program is funded by American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials and managed by the Transportation Research Board of the National Academy of Sciences.

For more information, see TRB’s SHRP 2 website.