Smartphone-Based Vehicle-to-Driver/Environment Interaction System for Motorcycles

This letter concerns the definition and the implementation of an add-on interaction system for motorcycles. The system consists of a vehicle-to-driver and a vehicle-to-environment communication mechanism, which is based on a smartphone core and on a wireless Bluetooth medium. The system is focused to increase the safety level of a motorcycle and it is constituted by a vehicle with a CAN bus, a compact embedded electronic unit implementing a CAN-to-Bluetooth gateway, a smartphone and a Bluetooth helmet. The driver-to-vehicle interaction is based on an audio interaction located at helmet level. The driver-to-environment is represented by communication via the HTTP protocol. The vocal synthesis, the speech recognition, and the gateway to the web server are implemented on the smartphone. This letter presents the hardware architecture, the software architecture and some case-study implementation issues. An evaluation of the critical aspects of the system is also provided.