Why we do REPOSIT
As most R&D projects, we realised that there is a real world problem and that technology could help to overcome it.
In our case, we noticed that there is a big problem related to casualties in road traffic accidents, and that technology was being used only to mitigate the effects once the vehicle has collided (structural design of car bodies, airbags, ...) or try to increase the performance and reliability of the systems controlling the dynamics of the car just before a potential collision (ABS, ESP, ...).
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.
By increasing the awareness horizon of the driver many situations in cross-road scenarios and longitudinal collisions can be avoided.
The other question we have to answer now is... why now?
The right moment to start developing this system has come because technology is mature enough to bring all this sci-fi ideas into a commercial system that can be installed in a vehicle. Until now, road safety was a concern shared by many of us, but there were not technologies that would allow low-cost solutions to be developed.
Nowadays we benefit from the boom in wireless communications and there will be soon standards for vehicle-to-vehicle communications. In the beginning those communications were developed for in-vehicle entertainment, but by itself is a service that people were not very fond of buying in. We have survived many years in vehicles without overly complex entertainment systems, so it was not perceived as a huge benefit. Nevertheless, adding a low-cost device that uses the inter-vehicle communications and could save your life is perceived as a must have service. It is a win-win situation for all the parties involved in the development of this technology.
Another sector that has experimented a huge growth in the last 3 years is the global positioning technology market. While the technology by itself has not developed that much in those years, the market penetration of devices using it has increased exponentially and it is common to see people using personal navigation devices to find their way on the road or in cities. As this technology is here to stay, we might as well put it to a good use and find innovative ways to benefit from it. In our case the innovation lies in the use of algorithms that allow a precise relative positioning between two receivers. Which translated to the vehicular environment we are working on, amounts to have full knowledge of the position of other vehicles with respect to oneself.
