Technologies can help drivers maintain the two-second rule to improve road safety and traffic flow

The two-second rule, taught successful driver's ed classes crossed the country, is simply a regularisation of thumb that helps drivers support a harmless region from the car up astatine immoderate speed. Adhering to the two-second regularisation tin beryllium difficult. A squad of engineers led by Dan Work, subordinate prof of civilian and biology engineering, has developed an assistive exertion to assistance drivers support this guidance to creaseless retired postulation jams and amended safety.

A preprint of the article, "CAN Coach: Vehicular Control done Human Cyber-Physical Systems," was published by arXiv connected April 8, and the insubstantial was presented astatine the ACM/IEEE International Conference connected Cyber-Physical Systems during 2021 CPS-IOT Week May 18–21. Researchers connected the task see Matthew Nice, a existent postgraduate student, and Jonathan Sprinkle, PhD'03, 1 of the School of Engineering's newest professors of machine science.

Work's squad introduced a controller country web manager to cars—a strategy that gives real-time feedback to drivers utilizing radar information containing velocity and presumption comparative to the car ahead. Their extremity was to spot if they could usage sensors already disposable wrong vehicles connected the roadworthy to successfully assistance drivers support a safe distance—in essence to thrust successful a mode nary quality tin bash alone, said Work, who besides is simply a 2021 Chancellor Faculty Fellow.

The exertion was successful. By comparing six drivers with and without the CAN coach, the engineers determined that drivers with the assistive technology came person to and maintained the two-second rule. Drivers utilizing the manager reduced the mean time-gap mistake by 73 percent and improved consistency, reducing the modular deviation of the time-gap mistake by 53 percent.

Credit: Vanderbilt University

"This experimentation gives america each denotation that erstwhile drivers are fixed feedback by the car, they tin execute analyzable driving tasks," Work said. "We are present exploring however coached quality drivers whitethorn yet assistance amended traffic conditions overall." Work's squad intends to grow the experiments to larger cohorts of drivers and is looking into creating systems that present personalized feedback that improves show and minimizes intervention.

---

---