pacific nw transportation consortium region 10 Pactrans

Developing a Portable Data Acquisition System to Study Road User Behavior

PI: Vinod Vasudevan (UAA), vvasudevan@alaska.edu, ORCID: 0000-0003-4078-9213

Co PIs: none

AMOUNT & MATCH: $50,000 from PacTrans; $50,000 Match

PERFORMANCE PERIOD: 8/16/2020 – 8/15/2022

STATUS: Completed

CATEGORIES: Data Acquisition System, Road User Behavior

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DESCRIPTION: The development of PDAQS involves two steps: setting up the hardware and developing software programs to extract useful data. As the first step, the sensors need to be put together to develop the hardware setup of the PDAQS. All these sensors need power to operate. A battery and power distributor will be used to serve this purpose. Finally, a laptop computer and (or a data integrator) will collect all the data on the same timestamp for efficient post-processing.

In the second step, software programs will be developed to extract useful data. The instruments can capture objects 360° around the vehicle. The relative coordinates of all objects detected by the instrumented vehicle can be extracted using the sensors. Using the relative position coordinates, the trajectory and relative speeds of these objects can be traced. Not all the objects detected by the instrumented vehicle may be of equal significance for transportation application (e.g., detail and locations of the roadside vegetation). Therefore, the emphasis will be on the accurate extraction of useful data related to dynamic objects, such as various road users, including pedestrians.