A MEASUREMENT AND PROCESSING SYSTEM FOR THE VEHICLE MOTION ENVIRONMENT (VME). CONFERENCE PAPER

A concept is presented for creating a measuring system that can quantify the specific motions which vehicles exhibit as they move in traffic, under the full array of traffic operations. Such a quantification is seen as crucial to the development of automatic collision prevention systems and has spin-off utility for the study of many other issues in human factors and vehicle and highway engineering. This study has addressed the experimental and analytical challenges involved in wide-area sensing, large-volume data processing, and both deterministic and statistical analysis of the data which will characterize this so-called "Vehicle Motion Environment" (VME). The basic concept which appears to be feasible for such measurements involves a remote sensor which is installed at the roadside, probably on a tall pole, and which produces electro-optic images of the traffic stream and converts them into a permanent data file of the quantified trajectory for each motor vehicle passing through the field of view.