SBIR-STTR Award

the goal of driver's education is to provide students with the skills necessary to safely and effectively operate a motor vehicle. While effective training has been implemented since the 1930s, research suggest opportunities to enhance driver hazard anticipation and avoidance, which could in turn dramatically impact public safety. Hazard-related training has traditionally been difficult to accomplish, with classroom exercises lacking impact and real-world driving experiences hard to constrain/keep safe. Fortunately, computer-based driving simulation has evolved to where well-designed training can be executed in a richly visualized, interactive, impactful manner. The focus of this program is to create a real-time, scenario-based desktop driving simulator that helps drviers with differing background (age,experience) gain greater awareness of hazards and safely avoid them. The work will create the simulator, an underlying training paradigm for hazard detection/response, and a database of hazards/scenarios that will be used in conjunction with it.

Recent research suggests there are opportunities to enhance driver hazard anticipation and avoidance, which could in turn dramatically impact public safety. For example, the fatality rate per 100 million vehicle miles among 16 year old drivers is some ten times higher than it is among those between the ages of 45 and 55. However, hazard-related training has traditionally been difficult to accomplish, with classroom exercises lacking impact and experiential components, and real-world driving experiences hard to constrain and keep safe. The purpose of LookOut is to create a real-time, scenario-based desktop/handheld driving simulator that helps drivers with differing backgrounds (e.g., age, experience) gain greater awareness of hazards and safely avoid them. A simulator, an underlying training paradigm for hazard anticipation/detection and avoidance that is implemented in the simulator, and a database of hazards/scenarios that will be used in conjunction with it are being created. The system will leverage video game technology and realistic vehicle models/physics, and run on standard PC computers (and handheld tablets) using very low-cost steering controllers, and, optionally, a low cost eye tracker.