Visible light communications for scooter safety

Scooters are commonly used in many countries due to their low sale price, better fuel economy, and the ability to easily navigate through heavy traffic congestions. Today in Taiwan, approximately 70% of the registered vehicles are scooters. However, due to the low cost nature of the scooters, many safety technologies developed for cars cannot be adopted by them; statistics show that accidents involving scooters contribute to more than 80% of fatalities in traffic accidents in Taiwan, resulting in more than 2,000 deaths annually. It is therefore crucial to develop a new low-cost safety system that can be used by scooters. The enabling concept in this new safety system is cooperation between vehicles: scooters and cars sharing their current status and their observation of the neighboring environment via Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications. However, how to implement this cost efficiently remains an open issue. Visible Light Communications (VLC) uses modulated visible light sources, i.e., changing the intensity of the light sent by the source, to transmit digital information, and Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) are usually used as the transmission source. As LEDs become commonly used in automotive lighting, VLC appears as an attractive and cost-effective solution to implement V2V communications [1,2]: no extra cost is needed for the main transmission component and the additional processing circuits have very low complexity.