What is REPOSIT
REPOSIT is a system that strives to make roads safer by increasing the awareness of the drivers regarding the position of the other cars on the road and how they are moving.
Increasing road safety is one of the priorities of the European Commission and that is the reason why this project was funded under the 6th Framework Programme for R&D.
The working principle behind this system is quite simple to understand and is enabled by evolution in fields such as global positioning and vehicular communications.
Nowadays, the use of positioning devices (GPS) is booming and it is common to see them being used to find ones way in a unknown city. But there is one not-so-known application that involves combining the information from two devices in order to obtain a much more precise relative positioning between the units. This is one of the main concepts that make REPOSIT possible.
In order to be able to obtain a relative positioning, we need two units to share their information and that can be achieved thanks to a set of emerging technologies related to inter-vehicular communications. Nowadays, vehicles are isolated entities on the road, but in the near future they will be exchanging information with other vehicles to provide in-vehicle entertainment and safety solutions among many others.
Until now we have described a system that is capable of knowing with a high accuracy the relative position of vehicles on the road, but REPOSIT goes one step further by being able to alert the user of potentially dangerous situations. In order to achieve that a module takes into account all the received information from the vehicles during the last seconds and tries to guess if there will be a collision. If a potential collision is predicted, an alarm is raised in order to warn the driver in advance and reduce his reaction time.
There are studies that suggest that the reaction time is a very significant factor in road accidents as the driver does not have enough time to take a decision in order to avoid a collision. REPOSIT tries to decrease that reaction time in order to avoid the collision or at least allow enough time to the car to reduce its energy before the crash.
If you are interested in reading more about the precise tasks of each of the modules of the system and outcomes of the project, keep on reading...
