NeTS: Small: Collaborative Research: Connected Barriers: Vehicle to Barrier Communication and Networking for Single-Vehicle Crash Safety

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More than half of fatal vehicle crashes in the US today are "run-off-road" (RoR) crashes and roadside barriers are the last means of mitigating their severity. Yet, vehicles of tomorrow are slated to operate on roadside infrastructure designed decades ago. This project aims to bridge this gap by establishing wireless connectivity between vehicles and roadside barriers by developing a novel vehicle to barrier (V2B) communication and networking paradigm called connected barriers (CBs). CBs will (1) complement on-board sensor technologies and existing physical barriers, (2) avoid RoR crashes, (3) minimize the severity of a crash when it is inevitable, and (4) help develop mutual collaborations between the roadside safety and vehicular communication and networking communities, which will lead to robust technology solutions. Based on Department of Transportation's value of a statistical life estimate in 2014, the societal cost of a crash is $9.4 million per fatality, with approximately 10,000 fatal ROR crashes each year. With widespread implementation, this research project could reduce fatal and non-fatal crash rates by up to 70%, which could save as many as 8,000 lives per year in the U.S. alone and billions of dollars in economic losses. This project supports 2 graduate students and its results will be incorporated into several courses at UNL and OSU. Insights from the project results will help establish collaborative efforts to educate both industry and academia in Nebraska and Ohio. To realize the CB vision, the project explores three main threads: (1) the foundations of V2B communication will be established through analysis of wireless channel characteristics in field measurements, actual car-crash tests, and channel model development. (2) to enable reliable control reactions, very high-fidelity barrier-assisted vehicle localization and vehicle-barrier synchronization solutions will be developed. (3) novel communication algorithms and protocols will be developed to disseminate periodic information about barrier and road conditions, and to facilitate real-time information exchange during upcoming RoR events, with an eye towards coexistence with existing communication standards. The developed solutions will be evaluated through encroachment and vehicle crash experiments in the Midwest Roadside Safety Facility, and system evaluations on low-volume suburban and rural road segments in collaboration with the Village of Eagle, Nebraska, and Nebraska's Cass County. Finally, a multi-time-scale simulation platform will be integrated by including empirical measurements of the wireless channel, vehicle and barrier dynamics, traffic dynamics, and communication and network dynamics to provide effective evaluation tools of the CB paradigmThis award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.