Cooperative ITS for two-wheel vehicles to improve safety on roads

Research efforts carried out on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) for improving safety and efficiency of road transportation have been focused on cars, where vehicular communications have demonstrated to enhance the driver awareness with active services that improve fatality statistics. Although common vehicles accidents have been reduced in the last years, those involving vulnerable road users remain. Cyclists and motorcyclists cover a whole area where ITS and telematics should be embedded with no doubt, given the incremental popularity of bikes and motorbikes in urban mobility and short interurban routes. For this reason, this work takes the key objective of integrating two-wheelers within the future cooperative ITS network. Hence, a novel communication device especially adapted to cyclists and motorcyclists has been designed, by integrating vehicular wireless communications (i.e. IEEE 802.11p) and considering interface limitations. From the protocols perspective the work is focused on IPv6, and considers two-wheelers as part of the Future Internet. In fact, a great success of the proposal is exploiting the synergy between IETF (Internet) and ITS-specific protocols coming from ISO and ETSI, creating a novel active system to improve two-wheel transport safety through Cooperative Awareness Messaging (CAM) over IPv6. The embedded communication node for two-wheelers includes the proper software to warn the driver about the approaching of a regular vehicle through audio and visual notifications. Moreover, its counterpart for common cars has also been developed, but using an Android application running on a handheld device connected to a regular IPv6 in-vehicle network.